Driving Blind

Imagine hopping in your car, putting on a blindfold, and driving to work.  That would be a pretty crazy experience (the closest I’ve come to that is when I’m too lazy to scrape the ice off my windshield and I attempt to drive peering through a few tiny holes in the ice… it is quite stressful).

I was talking to a buddy of mine recently who is an officer in the Navy.  One of his current responsibilities is to drive a large, nuclear submarine when the captain is not doing so.  Of course, this sounded very interesting to me and I was asking him tons of questions about it (most of which he would not answer…or he’d have to kill me…you know the drill).

When driving a submarine, you cannot see what is up ahead.  The normal method of using our eye sight to direct us, which we use for driving a car and pretty much everything else, is not an option for those commanding a submarine.

I asked him if that made him nervous and how often he ran into things.  He said that they operate under a ‘big ocean, small ship’ theory, which holds to the assumption that the ocean is so ridiculously large (and open) when compared with the size of the submarine that they can have confidence in driving the ship because the odds of hitting anything are so slim compared to the amount of open water in the ocean.

Obviously, steering the ship is more than just a guessing game and there are technologies that assist him in providing needed information to accurately drive the ship (especially when they get close to land), but the foundational truth that gives him the confidence to drive forward without being able to see with his eyes is the ‘big ocean, small ship’ concept.

For those of us following after God’s will for our lives, sometimes we can feel as though we are ‘driving blind’, that we cannot clearly see with our eyes (or with the sight of our own reasoning) what is coming up ahead.  However, we can operate with a concept similar to that of the Navy…what we could call the ‘Big God, small me’ principle.  When we begin to understand how ridiculously large (and good) our God is, and how small we are in comparison, we being to gain a new level of confidence about moving forward into the future, even when we can’t clearly see what is coming.  Just like when driving a submarine in the open seas, the odds are in our favor as we boldly pursue the plans that God has for us, for if God is for us, who can be against us?

In the same way one steering a submarine has the technology to assist him in his task, we are not just blindly moving forward and guessing our way through life.  We have been given tools to guide us in the path that God has for us…the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, the wise counsel of other mature believers, etc.

Many times, it would be nice to clearly see with my own eyes and reasoning what is in front of me in terms of God’s plan for my life (since that’s how I’m used to ’steering’ in other areas of life), but we often times do not have that luxury.  Instead, we must operate with the conviction that our God is so big, I am so small, and I can go forward in faith with confidence, even when I cannot see clearly, using the tools He has given me to follow after the plan He has for my life.