Personal Growth

Sunday I was driving back from church coming up I-75. At the particular mile marker where my story takes place there are about 5 lanes of traffic, and traffic was moderate--everyone was driving perhaps 55 miles an hour or so and there were a couple of car lengths between everyone. Traffic was brisk for an early Sunday afternoon but nothing to complain about.

I glanced in my rearview mirror, though, and from out of nowhere came a guy doing maybe 75 or 80 miles an hour. He was jerking from one lane to another to get around other cars, crossing all five lanes in the process. He passed right between me and a trucker and I had just a moment to glance into his car. I saw that he was chatting away on his cell phone. He whipped in front of me and then right back out of my lane again and into another lane. A few more seconds and he had disappeared over the hill in front of me.

There was a time--not too long ago--when I would have looked up to the sky and thought, "Please God, let me see that car crashed into the median a quarter mile down the road!" I'm not sure what changed in me, but something has, because I no longer have those thoughts. Instead, I moved from the prayer above to "Please God, let me see that car pulled over by a police officer a quarter mile down the road!" and then moved from there to what I think now, which is "Please God, let that man make it home safely." I told Lisa about my change of heart, and she said to me, "You've moved from justice to mercy." Maybe all those times teaching The Merchant of Venice rubbed off on me! Maybe I have had some actual personal growth as a human being.

But what brought about this change? While I'm not 100 percent sure,  I do have a guess: Three years ago in March I attended an educational conference in Louisville. On the last day a surprise snow storm blew through Kentucky. My superintendent, who was also at the conference, called me on my cell phone as I was heading toward a session and asked, "What are you doing?"

I thought he wanted to meet for breakfast or something. I'd been in my hotel, which was adjacent to the conference center, and was really pretty much unaware of the weather. "I'm heading to a session on Internet monitoring," I said.

"No, you're not," he said sternly. "You're getting in your car and heading home. The roads are bad and they're getting worse."

"This is the session I really came here for," I told him. "The guy who wrote this program gives it away for free to schools with the understanding that he's not going to support it and that we're not going to ask him to. This is pretty much the only time I'm going to feel comfortable asking him about the problems I'm having with it."

"Don't care," he said. "Everyone else from the district has already left, and I want to be the last one to leave. My SUV has brand new tires and is a 4x4, so if anyone has problems I want to be behind them to help. So I want you to leave NOW and I'll leave in 15 minutes." So I made a bargain with him--I'd go ask the guy one question before his session started and then take off--and then I did as he asked. I got in my car and headed up I-71 toward Cincinnati.

And my boss hadn't been lying. The roads were bad. Very bad. And they were getting worse. I got out of the metro area of Lousiville just as things were getting treacherous, and by the time I-71 had narrowed down to two lanes the roads were ice-covered. I wound up in the right lane behind a long string of traffic. We were giving each other plenty of room and all driving about 15 miles an hour.

And beside us, in the left lane, came a number of cars doing perhaps 40 or 45. I'm not sure if those people felt the laws of physics didn't apply to them or what, but they seemed completely unaware of road conditions. A big yellow Hummer was the first vehicle I noticed. It blew by me, tossing snow and slush and sleet onto my driver's window. I watched it disappear and I thought to myself, "Please God, let me see that SUV upside down in the median in a few minutes." I'd barely finished thinking the sentence when I looked ahead and there was the SUV, upside down in the median. The driver was crawling out of the window and appeared unharmed and was calling on his cell phone. As slippery as the roads were at the time I couldn't have stopped anyway if he HAD been hurt. I continued down the road.

I never thought that vicious thought again that day, but it didn't matter. Over the course of the next 15 minutes or so maybe 10 or 15 more cars raced by me, and I saw almost every one of them either turned around in the median or crashed into the guard rail on the right side of the road or lying on their sides. It was almost as if God had decided to answer all of my prior prayers all at once so that I could understand what I was really asking for.

I made it home safely that day (and so did my boss), but I was a changed person. I'd had enough justice in one day to last me the rest of my life. Anger and vengeance are no longer the primary feelings I experience when drivers race past me. Instead, I would say worry and concern have replaced them. I guess that is growth.

But I'm not perfect. Don't get me started on the morons who wait until the last second to merge when a lane is ending and then want to cut in front of me!...