Spirituality, going slow and articulated blessings.

If spirituality and speeding is an interesting theme for a previous (un)devotional blog, how about spirituality and going slow? The glee with which I welcomed the booking of the speeding BMW driver, must now to be compared with the plethora of spiritual and psychological pressures unleashed by motorists like me trapped behind big, slow moving, road hogging, articulated mobile warehouses.

On my way to pick up a parcel at College, along Seedhill Road and cars parked both sides. Ahead of me a massive vehicle as previously described, moving with slow I’m-bigger-than-anything-else-around authority. So I possess my soul in patience, move smoothly down the gears, and try to persuade myself this is not a problem, I don’t have any appointment, no time limit. Get to the roundabout and the big doppelganger negotiates it with graceful aplomb. And as we turn the corner towards the traffic lights I see the blessed big truck has a twin just ahead of it. And the only way to get into the factory they’re going to is to go through the lights and do a U turn to come back the way they came. The only way to do that is to take up both lanes, including the filter lane I want to take. They form an orderly queue of two, about 50 metres long. So I miss three sequences of lights before reaching the junction, and the light is red again. By which time my soul is not so much posessed in patience as just possessed.

What is it about minor delays (no more than five minutes all told), and what they do to minds and temperaments normally this side of placid? Why does maturity evaporate to be replaced by an inner head of steam? If there is only one way for XXXL trucks to negotiate a road, then in accpetance lieth peace, as Amy Carmichael famously advised in her poem.

I remain convinced that the fruit of the Spirit provides the emotional and psychological sub structure of good driving. And I can think of several of the nine Paul mentions that are seriously undermined by two oversized articulated aids to sanctification.  Time is such a precious gift – seems a pity to waste so much of it worried and bothered about how much is being wasted. Or, to put it another way, time is never wasted, it’s just differently spent! And time is never saved, it just constantly needs re-allocated. Next time I’m stuck behind stuff that slows me down, I’ll try to say, slowly, meaningfully and efficaciously,’

The fruit of the Spirit is ….patience…..gentleness…..self-control’.

Hope it works.