How to use your car for spiritual growth.

Drive alone.  Radio off.  Listen to nothing, except your inner self.  Pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, reactions as you observe others, and their driving ability, courtesy, and their tastes, decisions concerning their houses, businesses, whatever.

It’s good to have a foundation of grace in your life, so you have rock-solid confidence of Jesus’ unconditional love/acceptance of you, just as you are, SO THAT, you can get to know the real you while driving.  If you’re like ShepherdDave, it’s not a pretty picture.  The real me is not nearly so humble, gracious, enjoying of others just as they are, as my flesh would like to imagine.  Self-awareness and self-acceptance are the foundation of emotional and spiritual health.  Pharisees have plenty of self-acceptance, but little self-awareness.  And self-awareness without self-acceptance is the absolute worst combo.  Better to be a clueless, self-deceived Pharisee than a believer with suppressed self-contempt, extending only conditional love to myself when I perform up to expectations.

The spiritual-high-watermark of my week, is when I’m alone in the car.  Being retrained by Jesus.  It’s brutal getting to know the real me, but he who has a sense of having been forgiven only a little, loves only a little…others, self, Jesus, and His genius plan for each of us.  This song, When I’m All Alone, Give me Jesus, sums up my experience these days of driving alone in my car.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjTxnYiTAa8

—ShepherdDave/PhariseeDave, except when he’s been freshly convicted of the sin of independence/confidence-he-knows-what’s-best, so he’s momentarily DumbSheepDave, enjoying everyone just as they are, and his SovereignShepherdJesus’ genius plan for everyone, just as it is, and the bliss of Jesus-contentment/Jesus-dependency/Jesus-humility, so the nonbelievers around him might experience Jesus

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