The Dangers of Auto Pilot

I have finally arrived in Rockport, TX, on the Gulf Coast. Some family members have rented a cottage on the water for the week, and invited me to join them for the weekend. It was a slightly more eventful trip down than I’d anticipated.

As you may know from a post earlier this week, I put my back out on Monday, and it is much better, though not well, and so I’m not quite as alert as normal. It was a night drive because of an event tonight in Austin I had to attend. My ‘smartphone’ has GPS and maps, but not the audio to say, “Turn LEFT, you idiot!”

I don’t know how it is in the rest of the 50 States, but in Texas, highways have a strange way of making sudden changes in direction—turning right at an intersection so that if you continue straight, you’ve just gotten on a different road. They also merge and diverge, run parallel for 50 miles then reconverge only to make another dogleg in the booming metropolis of Podunk.

You can see where this is going.

I got to see a bit more of Southeast Texas than was originally on my itinerary…or at least would have if it were daylight. The worst only cost me about 10-15 miles fortunately, as I caught the error somehow just after passing the second leg of the triangle. In this, it is like father, like son, as dad has a reputation for taking three sides of a triangle only if he isn’t able to take four.

After this, I watched my phone’s directions a LOT more carefully, and caught mistakes right away, though once, I was supposed to stay straight, but it looked like I should turn, so ended up doing several turnarounds before heading off in the right direction.

The other part that you have to realize is that normally, I don’t have this problem, or at least not this badly.

But this whole episode was like a reality parable—you live it to learn the lesson. No matter how spiritual you might be, it can be easy to lose focus and let autopilot take you past where God would have you turn. However, He’s rather talented at rerouting your trip to get you back on course. The most egregious example is ye olde fruit in Eden. The second most egregious example resulted in an entire nation ‘cooling’ its collective heels in the wilderness for 40 years.

Ten or fifteen extra miles doesn’t sound so bad, after all.

SDG