"Get Smart" #2

“You have loved Me with all your heart…will you love Me with all your mind?!?”

When I sensed God asking me this question, I had no idea that HE was initiating a series of revolutionary changes that would soon bring a move to Atlanta, GA. This move to start another church immersed us into a world that was foreign to us. I don’t think I had ever spent more than 20 minutes in traffic in my life. Now, my daily commute was 1 hr. I quickly learned that rush hour (3 hours actually in am and pm) added a 2^nd hr., and a wreck or construction even more. A new home, new church, new schools, new stores, new malls and restaurants…new, different, unfamiliar everything. The one exception was daily traffic and travel.

When you spend a few hours a day in your car getting from here to there, you only have 3 options:

1. Use maps to discover and remember less popular, alternative routes.
2. Live frustrated, angry and bound in a cycle of delay and tardiness.
3. Learn to use the time for something beneficial.

Early on, the challenge and adventure attracted me to the 1^st choice. I would take a different route home from the church office every other day. It didn’t take long to discover that last year’s maps were wrong. It took a little longer to understand the same road often has 2 names (1 on the right, the other to the left) at major roadways. These however, caused few problems compared to the roads with the same name or highway #...going different directions. Then, I memorized the major intersections of Atlanta, and navigated by instinct after hearing the 15 second radio traffic report every 15 minutes.

After 6 months of intense education on ATL roads, maps and travel…I shifted my traffic time focus to #3. Deciding to invest this time wisely provoked a desire to learn and grow…a hunger to understand and know. Over the next 6+ yrs., I came to love the traffic time and hope for delays. These driving routines provided just what I needed…a consistent, daily, extended few hours for the things that mattered most…the things that could easily get cut short over the course of a busy day. Prayer, worship and learning (from sermon and book CD’s) had always been priorities for me, but now were magnified in my life. The foundation of my personal devotions, ministry service and study now became a platform for exponential growth as the benefits of stewarding my drive times began to overflow in my life.

God had providentially arranged a classroom (my car) to begin intensive teaching with me about how to love God and love the truth. Perhaps the greatest fruit of this was the habits of the mind that developed. It became clear that the calling to love God with all my mind meant a unique focus not just on what I should think, but how I could think better. As James Sire says, “To think –with more accuracy, more attention to implications for life, and more experience and acknowledgment of the presence of God in whatever is thought.” I understood that prayer and piety were essential, priority; but I was learning it was not sufficient alone. “Truth, thinking, theology, and the place of the mind must be given the emphasis they deserve from followers of Christ” (O. Guinness).

As I look back on those drive times, I realize I was learning to distinguish priorities, focus intentionally, and ponder effectively…I was learning to think, learning to learn; and as Maxwell Smart says, “…and loving it!”