We Are the Four-Year-Old in the Backseat

"My family once made a trip from Dallas to the San Antonio area for my wife, Lauren's, birthday. On the drive down, my then four-year-old daughter Audrey piped up from the backseat, "Do you know where you're going?' I felt insulted. Lauren started chuckling. She just laughed, and then she asked, 'Well, do you?' 

I said, 'Please, I'm on I-35. You just take it straight down.'

Then Audrey announced, 'I think you're lost.'

I said, 'I think you're about to get a spanking.' (I'm just kidding.)

The whole thing was kind of comical. Four-year-old Audrey has gotten lost in the house. She really has. And we don't have a big house. This the girl who freaks out if she ends up outside all by herself. This is a girl who has no sense of direction, who has no idea which way to head to get anywhere, and she's in the backseat presuming to ask me, 'Do you know where you're going? I think you're lost.'

I said, 'Well, um, you can't spell your name. So there's that.'

Okay, I didn't say that either. But this is kind of what happens every time we presume to put God under the microscope of our scrutiny, our logic, or our preconceptions of what he should be like or what he should do.

'How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!' is God's way  of saying to Paul, 'Are you serious? You're going to scrutinize how I govern? Do you know how small you are? Do you know how inadequate you are to even comprehend your own life? You can't comprehend and figure out your own shortcomings, your own failures, why you're drawn to sin, and why there are things that master you, yet you'll scrutinize me?' We are the four-year-old in the backseat telling Dad he doesn't know where he's going."

--Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel