Seriously, God...mom gets to see Waymo in her life time?
Life never stops moving, so how do we stop to smell the roses?
My mother as born in 1940 while the world was raging in a second world war, and her home was occupied by neighboring country. Cars were starting to take over Korea, but outside Seoul in the countryside you still could see horses used for transportation. I’m sure she saw them when traveling outside Seoul and maybe even within the city limits.
One war would end, but another much closer to home would begin in the 1950s. Like so many she would move around until she could find a safe place. The war was difficult on a pre-teen, but the war would also introduce aid and influence from the United States in the years after. This included Ford Motor Company helping Hyundai launch its first car in 1967-68, the Cortina. I am not sure if she or her family owned one, but I’m sure she saw them buzz around Seoul while she went to school and worked as young adult woman. As post-war Korea would remain in the doldrums of rebuilding, she refused to stay still and moved United States in early 70s to marry her future husband in different land.
After moving to the US, my parents’ first new car was an ascot blue 1971 Chevy Camaro, a two door American steel muscle car, which was an impractical purchase for a growing family at the time. But they wouldn’t have known how quickly a future child and elderly parents would push them for larger car so soon. A two door sports car would be replaced with a family station wagon and would kick off a series of family station wagons and minivans for the next few decades. My mother would drive each car to her beauty supply business everyday, pick me up off from school activities, and shuttle us all to church two to three times a week. I don’t remember my mother sitting down once. She was always on the go, always driving somewhere.
Both my parents were good drivers throughout their entire lives, but my mom had an uncanny sense of direction all the way up to her 80s. For decades she would drive my dad to a second church an hour away from where we lived, so he could serve a tiny Korean population in the Athens, Ohio so they could have a service in their native tongue. She would drive, and he would sit and read his Bible in preparation. Over 30 years she drove over 300,000 miles to that little church. When she had to finally stop driving after my dad passed because of her dementia (she mistakenly ended up in a city two hours away from us, so we knew she was done driving), it was sad to see her lose her freedom to cruise the freeways. Even now, her favorite thing to do is have someone drive her anywhere, so she can take in the sights and feel that sense of motion and movement. She remembers little in life, but she still loves that feeling of moving in a car. I can’t explain what about motion she enjoys, but I know that I have the same feeling when I move. We were made to move.
Recently, while in Los Angeles I was driving her and my kids around they city, and we saw several Waymo cars navigating the city. Waymo cars are fully autonomous vehicles which continue to get better and better in traversing cities like Los Angeles. In layman’s terms, these cars do not human driver.
Every time we saw a Waymo it was right out of reach for us to look inside, but sure enough I spotted one right ahead me slowing down for a red light. I shifted to the lane beside the car, so we could all stop and peer inside. “Mom, look over here. No one is driving that car,” I said.
Perplexed, she said, “Why is that car in the middle of the road without a person?”
“This car drives itself.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she snapped back at me with an concerned look. “Someone is driving it remotely, right?”
The traffic light turned green, and I told her watch as the Waymo car sped off. She had this look of horror that made me laugh. She wouldn’t remember this moment, but maybe there will be a day an elderly woman with dementia can get into a self-driving car without the aid of her kids or grandkids and end up exactly where she needs to be all by herself again.
(In the clip below you’ll see my kids were just as taken back seeing an empty car drive itself. What will we they and I see in a few decades—hovering cars?)
There are several verses in Psalm about being still before God (e.g., Psalm 46:10). I feel all my life I’ve been told to be more still and more present. I’m sure my mother was told the same in her life. People who like perpetual motion certainly can fall prey in moving too quickly and in the wrong direction. Psalm 104:5 says, “He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.” The irony of that is the earth may feel still, but it never stops rotating and moving around the sun. There are no seasons and there is no day and night without movement. The earth will not be moved by something else, but God designed it to always be moving.
Like driving a car though, I bet what my mom and I really enjoy about driving and being in motion is being in control of our motion. The idea of a Waymo car is absolutely terrifying because of it. But we have to keep moving because that’s the way God designed me and her. People who like to move can also fall prey to focusing more on the destination and forget the ride. It is always what’s the next thing and how do we get there. Life doesn’t stop for any of us, but how do we keep moving but take in the surroundings and people more intentionally? How does the earth feel so still, but in reality move so rapidly? Going forward, I pray I will move with the Lord’s leading and also cherish the ride I am on to move towards my heavenly prize (Philippians 3:14) while cherishing the one’s around me.
Are you more an enjoy the ride person or get to the destination as quickly as possible person? How does it affect how you relate to God?
When I was in LA a couple weekends ago, I deliberately called a Waymo for a slightly non-walkable distance rather than a conventional Uber. (Remember when ride-sharing was also a novelty?) On top of the rapidly improved technology, I was surprised by the normalcy and rapid acceptance of them among locals.
That aside, as a person who prefers to not move at all, focusing on enjoying the ride can quickly become a sinful contentedness, so remembering the destination a la Philippians 3:14 has also been important for me. But I don't necessarily think the way forward God prescribes is to overcorrect and only focus on the destination either. And aiming for a particular balance or maintaining a perfect tension between two truths seems to limit ourselves to swinging back and forth forever.
The chapter on Time in CS Lewis's Mere Christianity has helped me immensely with these kinds of questions. We are limited to experiencing life second by second, but God is outside of time. He is at the destination. He is in the journey. But we can only experience and know God in the current moment, whether we are on the move or we are still. So we can enjoy both, knowing that God is with us!