Good Like a Medicine

I have been humbled, my dear friends.

I got lost on the way to a new friend’s house today, and I was pulled over FOR SPEEDING. (Sorry, I won’t ever yell again on my blog.) Do you know how angry I was? I was pretty angry. I just nodded at the officer when he handed me my ticket — didn’t even say a word to him. If you know me, that’s not like me at all; I can’t even see the mailman without striking up a short conversation.

Lesson and morale of the story: you may recall how God convicted me several months ago about speeding and how I resolved to change this part of my life to glorify God. Well, I will be honest and say I have kept my commitment. I had not gone over the speed limit, and today I blew it. I was late after I had been on the phone twice with her giving me directions and didn’t want to be the idiot who got lost, so when I saw I had made a wrong turn, I turned around and rushed back to the intersection just in time to get stopped. Aaaagh! I wanted to cry out to the officer and ask him, “Can you go to this web address? www.goodlikeamedicine.com? You can read about how I never speed there.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Back to what I was trying to get at earlier: what did I learn from this? Well, not much of anything for several hours. It pretty much ruined my day.

As I have sat and thought about it tonight, though, I realize God is again humbling me and breaking down my self-righteousness. I haven’t blogged about speeding since I made that commitment because I kept thinking, “I need to do that and talk about all the good things I’ve learned, like it makes my life so stress-free to slow down, like I stopped caring what people think about me on the road, like I feel good about obeying the law, like the funny thing is people who pass me end up right beside me anyway at the next red light!!!” Well, God had other plans, and He would rather me blog about the pride of all of that coming before a fall.

“It’s just a silly ticket, Kristi,” you say. “Get over it.”

It’s not the couple hundred dollars that bothers me. It’s the points that make my insurance go up, signifying that I am a consistently “unsafe” or “reckless” driver. It’s the fact that I really have been obeying and going the speed limit, and the day I go faster, I get caught. It’s that I’m so bothered by getting caught. It’s that I thought I had “arrived,” and somehow I was above messing up and getting caught. Why does that bother me so much? Especially after I had just posted about God’s sufficient grace this very morning? There’s a lot of lessons to be learned it that.