My office opens at 7 am on Thursdays to accommodate kids before school.  This means that our staff meeting is at 6:45 am, which means that I must leave the house no later than 6:15 am, which means that my alarm goes off at 5:30 am.  At this time of year in Atlanta, that leaves a good hour and a half of varying stages of darkness before the sun rises. The half-hour I spend in my car headed northwest falls in the pitch-black segment of that spectrum.

My alertness and mood vary on that ride, depending on whether or not I took an Ambien the night before.  But there’s always a second, right after I pull out of our parking deck, when I sense the quiet and stillness surrounding me and feel that I really am alone with God.  The thought envelops me and heaps warmth on top of that provided by the coffee at my side.  For a few minutes, leading up to my entry on the main road, my prayer is undistracted and my heart is calm.  Then I hit the intersection of Roswell and Johnson Ferry Roads and the inexplicably long red light I remain parked at, and my mood shifts.  Then I turn onto Johnson Ferry and am cut off by an idiot in a pickup truck, and I am forced to lay on my horn and peel around then whip in front of him, my rear bumper a hair’s width from his front one, because finger signals don’t show up in inky darkness.

I would be such a good Christian if it weren’t for other people.

Luckily (aka gracefully), I am not concerned with being a “good Christian.”  The definition of this phrase, much like that of a “good person,” is as arbitrary as Atlanta traffic law obedience.  To one person, it means marching in pro-life demonstrations at abortion clinics.  To another, it means adopting animals from rescue shelters.  To this woman, it looks like baking the most cookies for the church potluck.  To that guy, it looks like never voting Republican.  To some, it looks like burning a Koran.

My earliest theological thoughts foreshadowed my long years of Works-Oriented Religion.  At about four, I reached a conclusion after minutes of thought on the subject, and from the backseat of our car I asked The Mom, “Is Santa Claus God?” My mind could not fathom any other way that the jolly dude could reach each and every child’s house in one night.  But as I got older, the parallel between them became less about omnipresence and more about reaction.  As in, if I were good, both would reward me.  Long after I lost my faith in Santa Claus, my faith in God still hinged on this principle. And so I entered the adult world expecting my particular road to be straight and predictable based on the nature I attributed to God: that of Him being my personal assistant who took character cues from a Christmas symbol.

It took two miserable years and an identity crisis for that expectation to be demolished.  (I am a stubborn learner.)

So on the road the other day, when I felt the familiar guilt that comes with yelling obscenities at others from my car, my first thought was, I really need to be a better person and stop doing that. My second thought was, I am probably never going to stop doing that. And so the chasm between what “should” be and what is shone in the light thrown on it by my insufficiency.  Grace walked in, hardhat in place, and said, “Somebody call for me?”

What I was always missing from my faith, and what is the central component of it now, is the truth that this walk is not a self-improvement project.  No amount of effort will ever get me from Here to There, and even if it could, I rarely know where There is anyway–and you can’t tell me, because your There is not the same as mine.  His ways are personalized, and unsearchable, like that.  What I need can never be attained, only imparted.  For a rule-follower with a shamefully bad sense of direction, there’s something both terrifying and freeing about not being qualified to run the staff meeting each day.  Seeing only as far as the light in front of me can produce indescribable despair if my eyes remain on the line where the inky blackness begins.  But within the beam, if I’ll just stay there, is untold quiet and stillness.  And rest.