I Drive

Confessions of a three year old in faith

When our youngest daughter was three, we took the family to Disneyland. She didn’t enjoy the rollercoasters much, but Flying Dumbo was just her style. She went around once with a parent at the controls, watched a second time while a sister took a turn, and on the third go-round she stepped in beside her dad, smoothly took the controls, and announced, “I drive!”

It’s funny in a three year old (and she was a very funny child who could make an entire auditorium of people laugh with a well-timed “meow” when the lights went out), but less funny in a Christian adult who is trying to walk by faith, not by sight, and not in her own strength. I recognize myself in that Disney vignette, pushing Jesus over and grasping the steering wheel of my own life, telling Him, “I drive!”

When I was seven years old, my parents separated and got a divorce. I began to have a repeating dream. I know where it came from; my father used to put me on his lap and let me steer the car when I was big enough to grasp the steering wheel, just a fun dad thing to do back in the pre-seatbelt days when there were a lot fewer cars on the roads and dads could use their own judgment about what was safe.

Then, right before my parents separated, before I was aware that there was a giant iceberg in my childhood’s idyllic path, Daddy taught me to ride a bike without training wheels. He held onto me, gave me a good push, ran beside me, encouraged me to keep pedaling, and said, “I’ve got you, I won’t let go.”

But he did. Scared but wanting to please him, I gripped the handlebars tight and pedaled with all my might, and I was unaware that I had left him behind. As soon as I turned my head to look for his smile of approval, I realized he wasn’t there, and promptly fell over. I felt a little betrayed that he had let go after he promised that he wouldn’t, but he picked me up, set me on my bike, encouraged me, and soon I was riding on my own.

I didn’t know then that it was the last thing he would ever teach me, though perhaps he did. The iceberg took my ship down that Easter. And I began to dream every night that I was sitting in the back seat of the car, riding along until I noticed there was no driver in the front seat. I climbed over into the front seat and took the wheel, but I couldn’t reach the pedals…Daddy had always done the pedals, so I didn’t know which one was the gas and which one was the brake. I gripped the steering wheel tightly, like the handlebars of my bike, unsure what to do but knowing it was up to me to keep my little sister safe. There was no one else.

I drive?

The dream recurred for years, even into adulthood, and finally faded away. But it gave birth to another recurring dream, in which I was driving fairly competently, but the road was like a roller coaster, overpasses and underpasses twisted about each other, round and round I drove, able to see my destination in the distance but never reaching it as the road took another turn back to the tangle of freeway. I was alone in the car now, my responsibility dream gone, but I just couldn’t get anywhere. It was the dream illustration of “you can’t get there from here.”

I drive.

When I was thirteen, Jesus came for me. I knew Him already, but He wanted me to give my life to Him, and I did, in a house brimful of the kind of sin that would drag most thirteen year olds straight into the Pit. I loved Him and I trusted Him, but it was just Him and me and an old Bible I didn’t know how to read on my own.

Fortunately, as it turns out, I was a scrawny kid with few friends (because we were always moving) who would bring 14 books home from the library without even a bag to carry them in, and finish them in a weekend, so I had a lot of good teachers, even if they were all dead. In the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll culture in my house and on the TV and among my peers, I took character lessons from my Victorian spinster paper mothers (Louisa May Alcott, Eleanor H. Porter, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Laura Ingalls Wilder) and my paper father C.S. Lewis, who taught me how a Christian life should be lived. But none of them were able to give me Christian driving lessons. I loved Jesus, but I didn’t have conversations with Him, or ask Him about the dilemmas in my life, or trust Him to provide for me.

So I kept the steering wheel in my hands. I became a latchkey prepper at age 11, withdrawing to the basement with a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter whenever there was a tornado warning on TV, always trying to think ahead so I would be prepared for whatever disaster came next. There never seemed to be any adults around except at dinner, when it was the time to browbeat, bully, and abuse us (I have since learned that this was a deliberate psychology experiment using gestalt aggression therapy and neurolinguistic programming on us…now I know why the cat was named after the narcissist Fritz Perls).

I’m not sure how old I was, but I had another dream, this one not about cars…it was a rocket dream, and I was sitting on the rocket, and it was about to take off. Whether it came back or not was up to me. I remember deliberating in the dream, deciding whether I should keep going or return. I decided to return and stick it out.

Perhaps that dream came after the child porn film the neighbor teen made of me and his younger sister, dressing us up like little prostitutes (where did he get all the outfits?) and getting us to pose and be silly. Or perhaps it came after my mother married my abusive stepfather (who had lived with us for two miserable years already until my parents’ divorce—and his—was final) and sent us to stay with that same neighbor boy’s family while they went on their honeymoon. Who was the film for? I don’t know, but clearly someone in our house knew someone in theirs.

Before my mother and stepfather returned, a friend of my mother’s brought us home, and she clearly had strict instructions to get my long thick blonde hair cut off. I didn’t want to but she was so nice and talked me into getting a cute shag cut just like hers, but on me it wasn’t cute at all. Certainly no one would recognize this homely little third grader as the pretty little blonde in the porn film.

It’s not like I could have told anyone, even if I had realized that I was being exploited and abused. My sister and I were told that our father didn’t want to be our father anymore, and our stepfather wanted to adopt us. We never saw or heard from anyone in our former life after that (though by God’s grace the adoption papers—which my father signed—were never completed, so we ended up with no legal father at all, a far better fate than being adopted).

The following fall I entered fourth grade and instead of taking the bus, I walked back and forth to the new school that just opened, another of the ten schools I attended in twelve years. One of the first assemblies they had was on the evils of drugs. We were told to report anyone who we knew was using marijuana.

Like my mom and step-dad? I walked slowly home trying to decide what to do. Were children allowed to report their parents to the police? Should I tell my teachers? Obviously I had no idea the assembly was about preventing drug use in kids, not adults. I wrestled with this new dilemma as I stared at clover patches looking for answers. Even a four leaf clover would be something.

No four leaf clovers appeared. I had to make this decision without help. Life was a living hell at our house…but is it right to betray one’s parents? Who would we live with if we were taken away? Our father (I had been told) didn’t want us. In the end, I chose to say nothing. Or rather, I made the same lonely, grim choice I had made on the dream rocket. I chose to stick it out.

This all happened before Jesus came to me, of course. He had watched me, a happy beloved daughter of the rector of the Episcopal church in beautiful small town America, become an unhappy, unloved daughter of nobody in the Sin City of crackerbox townhomes around the Beltway. At thirteen, the second half of my life couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the first; from light to dark almost instantly. I hadn’t needed Jesus in the first half, because I had my daddy. I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking: Maybe that explains why God would allow those hard things to happen to me.

But needing Him and letting Him drive my life are two separate things. After two clear spiritual choices to walk the hard road I had been set to, I became a stayer and a fighter. I dug my toes in. Puzzles and problems to solve? Hand them over. Buried truth? I’ve got a shovel and I’m not afraid to use it. Impossible tasks? I can handle them.

So of course God gave me more than I could handle. As I succeeded in each impossible task, a new and harder one would take its place, and I would throw myself at it again, learning everything I could, trying to be sufficient for my husband and children, endeavoring to protect them against the evils of my own childhood without passing on my own wounds, to teach them about Jesus but frankly to shield them from their own need for Him. My goal was to achieve for them the home happiness I once had and had lost.

And so God allowed my family to crumble and fall like Humpty Dumpty, that it can never be put together again. Well, not by my own strength. At least I know when I’m beat. The evil is still in my family, still working to unmake everything I make, still trying to conceal the truth about the past that I am gradually piecing together, and drag my adult children into Satan’s web of sin and sorcery to part them from any intimacy with Jesus. I can do nothing about it now. My husband is so disabled that we do nothing and go nowhere except medical offices.

So this is where Jesus finally gets to drive. He is a gentleman and has not shoved me over like a three year old; He’s been waiting for me to take my hands off the wheel and scoot myself over so that He can get in and drive. I still don’t know how to stop myself at every sentence and pause before every action to consult with Him first, but I’ve certainly tackled enough impossible tasks in my life, and this is the first one I won’t have to tackle alone, without answers.

Trusting that the Word is open and ready to speak to me, I asked, and my Bible opened to Psalm 20:

1 May the LORD answer you in the day of trouble
May the name of the God of Jacob defend you;
2 May He send you help from the sanctuary,
And strengthen you out of Zion.
3 May He remember all your offerings
And accept your burnt sacrifices.

A broken and contrite heart—These, O Lord, You will not despise.—Psalm 51:17

4 May He grant you according to your heart’s desire,
And fulfill all your purpose.
5 We will rejoice in your salvation,
And in the name of our God we will set up our banners!
May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.
6 Now I know that the LORD saves His anointed;
He will answer him from His holy heaven
With the saving strength of His right hand.

"He must increase, but I must decrease. —John 3:30

7 Some trust in chariots and some in horses;
But we will remember the name of the LORD our God.
8 They have bowed down and fallen;
But we have risen and stand upright.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?—Rom 8:31-32

9 Save, LORD!
May the King answer us when we call.

Imagine being a Christian for 48 years and finally learning how to walk with Jesus, not run up ahead of Him or stubbornly refuse His help while I exercise my self-will with the hubris of a puny human who acts like God’s purpose is to clean up my messes when I can’t be sufficient like He is. I have my answer.

You are sovereign, Lord. You drive.

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