If you were to tell me that I would be living life full-time in a 5th wheel trailer with my husband, our three young kids and our dog, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. If you were to tell me that I would be traveling over 3,000 miles in less than two months, that we would not know where we were staying from week to week and that I would be happy doing all of that, I would have also called you crazy. “Not in a million years,” would have been a well-known saying you would have heard escape my lips if you told me what my life would look like at this moment. But, when I finally gave up the keys to the driver’s seat of my life, I found that living life from the passenger seat allows me freedom and joy that I would have never thought possible.
You might be wondering what living life from the driver’s seat looks like. Life in the driver’s seat looks like trying to control outcomes; choosing to do what I want to do and assuming that my choice is the best one. Life in the driver’s seat looks like decisions being made that fit into what society tells me I should be doing, what should have my attention and the order of importance I should be placing on how I use my time. To put it simply, driver’s seat living makes me the god (little “g”) of my own life.
But life from the passenger seat looks much different. I finally understand that being a Christian is not only about asking Jesus to forgive all of my sins and asking him to live in my heart. A Christian life is a life laid down. What does that mean? It means that we allow God to be Lord over our lives. And what does a Lord do? A Lord reigns, leads, and protects. Having Jesus as Lord over my life means that instead of making all of my own decisions, I take those questions, those decisions, and I ask the Lord what he would have me do. It’s from his direction that I now follow, not my own. When he says go, I don’t hesitate. When he says pause, I stop. I am in not in control of my life because his ways, his plans are so far exceeding what I could ever hope or imagine.
You might be wondering what life from the passenger seat has looked like for our family of five and a dog. It looked like God telling us to rent out our house for a year so we could steward our resources while he called us to do a Christian outreach trip. It has looked like being able to go to a discipleship school for three months in Kona, Hawaii. It looked like living in South Africa doing missionary work for nearly two and a half months. The passenger seat looks like hooking up our 5th wheel trailer at the end of August and heading east. It looks like seeing U.S. landscapes we’ve never seen before. It looks like traveling through states we’ve never driven through before. It looks like friends we would have never met had we not been on the road. It looks like morning campfires on a random Wednesday. It looks like fishing from the dock outside our trailer door. It looks like seeing the exquisite east coast fall colors in person. And it looks like escaping two different hurricanes because we allowed God to divert our driving route instead of trying to control where we thought we should go. When we finally gave up having control in our life, what we gained has been so much more.
So many think that giving God control over their lives means a life of depravation, boredom and religiosity. But I can say it is quite the opposite. This journey we are on is one that my family will never, ever forget. We are closer than we have ever been. We understand each other more than we ever have. And our faith continues to grow stronger and stronger as we see God move and work in and through our lives. I know that whatever he calls me to, he will also equip me to see it through.
This is a journey that I would have never had the creativity–or faith–to dream up myself. So I am choosing to stay in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.
