Moving with the Flow  by Jessie Rice Sandberg

   People who have known my 94-year-old mother well through the years
know that even when she was driving a great deal, she was never known
for speeding. However, there is a story about her life in the fast lane
which she often tells on herself, and so I feel free to share it with
you here.

   A number of years ago, when my father was still alive, she made
frequent trips between Murfreesboro, Tennessee and the Nashville
Airport (a distance of about 30 miles) taking my dad to and from
various specific plane flights. Usually my father did the driving. He
was not patient with slow drivers, and generally wanted to get wherever
he was going as fast as was legally possible. (Occasionally he
neglected to notice what speed was legal!)

   On one rare evening when my mother went to meet his plane, he was
unusually tired and decided to let her do the driving home while he
"snoozed." Mother drove along for several miles enjoying the scenery
(and again, people who know my mother well, know she always enjoys the
scenery. Nothing ever gets old to her!) while daddy slept in his seat.

   Suddenly the quiet was broken by my dad's voice. "Aren't you going
awfully fast, mother?"

   As mother tells the story, she answered, "I'm just going with the
flow of the traffic, " but when she looked at the speedometer, she
realized she was going 90 miles per hour!

   Now I know you are going to want to know what the moral to this
story is supposed to be. (My children say my stories always have
morals!) I could say, of course, that the moral to the story is that
you always get caught when you break the speed limit, but I personally
think my dad was a little amused that my law-abiding mother would get
caught doing such a thing! Don't ask me where the police were!

   I could say that the moral to the story is that you never can trust
sweet little innocent-looking old ladies. They may be speed demons!

   Actually, aside from the fact that I mainly wanted to tell you that
particular story about my mother, I do have a "moral" in mind.

   Have you ever thought about the fact that most of the things that
eventually end up being dangerous or immoral or illegal usually start
with something as innocent as "going with the flow"? Whatever group we
tend to associate with ultimately affects our behavior. We do not
measure our rules or our actions by absolutes, but by the behavior or
the norms of the people around us. When we are "going with the flow"
and that is our only measurement of speed, then we do not know how fast
we are really going.

   If we measure our "little" sins by someone else's "big" sin rather
than the absolute standard of God's perfection, we lose our capacity to
judge the depths of our own depravity.

   Nothing in life can be measured by a variable standard. Moving with
the flow may seem comfortable and safe as a gauge of our movements, but
it is not.

   The security for all of us in determining our actions, our thoughts,
our relationships, is to be found in the absolute, unchanging authority
of the Word of God. Nothing else is safe!

    Return to Previous Page