Who is in the driver's seat?

What drives your life? This is a question I reflected on this morning, as I work my way through the book “Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren.


Rick poses several possibilities that drive many people’s lives.

Are you driven by guilt? Are there things in your past that you regret? Do you spend time reminiscing on painful memories, rehashing past mistakes? Are you so afraid of repeating them that you no longer take risks?

We all have things that we can feel guilty for. Aside from the many small mistakes of life, when I look back, I can focus most of my guilt on the one time I truly made a disaster out of everything around me. Because I was going through a difficult period, I allowed my negative emotions to get the better of me and did and said things that effectively destroyed the relationships I had with the people around me. I could see myself shattering all that was good in my life, and at the same time felt powerless to stop it.

Eventually as I turned things over to God, He helped me to put all the broken pieces back together. But it took a lot of time, and some of the damage will never be fully repaired. For a long time after I was driven by guilt resulting from this time period and the year leading up to it. In talking to others, though, I realized that we’ve all gone through things like this. Everyone has at some time or another made mistakes so big we feel they can never be fixed.

Acceptance of those mistakes frees us from the guilt attached. God forgives. Most of the time the people around us, if they truly care about us, forgive as well. But we also have to forgive ourselves. We have to kick guilt out of the driver’s seat and replace it by God’s love and grace. Guilt will take us no where, and really, it serves no useful purpose. There is no way to rewind time and change what happened. It’s in the past, therefore we must accept it, and use it to move us forward into the future.

Some of the other things people are driven by are resentment, fear, materialism, or other people’s expectations. I realized that at various times in my life I have been driven by each of these things. But is that who I really want in the driver’s seat of my life? Definitely not. I would compare this to being in a car with an unsafe, unskilled, or somewhat impaired driver. All things I have experienced, and wouldn’t want to experience again.

Additionally I wouldn’t want to be the one in the driver’s seat. Even though I have taken driving lessons, I’m not very good at it, and tend to get very scared and jumpy. But when you put God and His purpose for you in the driver’s seat, that’s like being in a car with someone whose driving skills you have perfect faith in. Like going on a long trip with my dad at the wheel. I can relax, take a nap, read a book, listen to music. I know he’s a safe driver, and I trust him to get us to our destination.

So who’s driving your car of life? It’s something important to reflect on now and again, to make sure that we’ve got the right driver, and are heading where we want to go.