Please Be Patient! Student Driver.
Around our area, several vehicles have been driving down the road or stopped at red lights with bumper stickers that inform others that a high school kid is behind the wheel. A few cars have stickers attached to the back, to each side, and on the front hood. THOSE cars really make you keep your distance!
I can understand the caution. People in our area drive like entitled maniacs, zooming from one lane to a spot two lanes over like they’re navigating the sales racks at Nordstrom’s. Whatever driver’s training class they took has been long forgotten, or they flunked the course. It’s fascinating to watch someone who has been speeding down the road have his excessive progress interrupted by getting behind one of the student drivers’ cars. As they say, patience is a virtue, but when someone is implored to be patient there is a tightening of the jaw muscles and white-knuckling happening on the steering wheel.
Most of us believe in extending grace as long as we’re not involved in the extending. Let the pimply-faced kid be in someone else’s lane. He needs the experience, but let him get it in while he’s in someone else’s way.
Yesterday, Carol and I took the three oldest grandkids to a water park north of Denver. On the way home, three motorcycles weaved through the highway traffic, going over a hundred miles an hour. A few miles later, three vehicles did the same. Our sixteen-year-old grandson was in the car. In three weeks he takes his driver’s license test. He’s been the kid in the car with the Student Driver signs for several months. I was thankful he wasn’t behind the steering wheel as the Evil Knievels came zipping by.
Grace isn’t just the willingness to extend forgiveness. It’s also understanding that we’re all in some type of “unpreparedness”, and seeing that other person, whether it be an apprentice, a student driver, a rookie, a less-talented all-thumbs clumsy doofus, or a slower-than-molasses senior with patient eyes and an understanding attitude.
In a time when entitlement is discussed in various circles—seemingly always in reference to someone other than ourselves—the graceless attitude we sometimes possess is another warped form of the “e word.” Our huffing and puffing about the situations and people in our lives that mess up our schedule or slow our speed demon agenda has the fingerprints of entitlement upon it.
Think about the sweating palms of that teenage driver, the uncertainty of the road decisions she has to make, and her striving for perfection on every careful turn at a street corner. Give her some grace. Maybe say a brief prayer for her with your eyes open.
Maybe pray for the parents while you’re at it. “Lord, prepare them for that first car insurance premium billing they’re going to receive!”
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