I drove to Lubbock to take Zack back to college yesterday. It is a long drive, about four hundred miles, and usually takes us seven hours which includes a few rest stops. We drive the same route most of the time, and we’ve done it enough that the road is very familiar to us. We know when we need to get into a specific lane to turn, where to buy gas and how long it takes to get from one stop to another.
Now, west Texas does not offer the most exciting scenery. Don’t get me wrong, it is beautiful, in a rugged and wild sort of way. But you drive for miles and miles and miles looking at a landscape that is exactly the same as the miles before and after. You might see an oil well or windmill here and there. Some hardy souls have built homes in the middle of the countryside, and there is occasionally some building that looks like a business or industrial site. There are fields full of sagebrush, forests of oak and mesquite, and farms covered in cotton. I have seen tumbleweeds and dust devils, and roads that are so straight and long that I don’t think I am ever going to get anywhere. I’ll make the return trip today.
The route is so familiar that we know when there is something new or different, but not so familiar that we’ve stopped seeing the landscape. I noticed a brand new sign along the road identifying the company that owns the land and who drills the wells. It is a large and impressive sign, and impossible to miss. Along with the big changes, I also noticed a few things that might not be so obvious. There are hundreds of windmills that line the ridges just south of Lubbock. Every windmill looks exactly the same, and yet I could see that they have added more in the time since I last took the trip. The number of windmills has at least doubled since we started making this drive two years ago. Over past two years I have noticed a few businesses that have closed or changed. There was a brand new drug store that was under construction last month, but was nothing more than an empty lot in August.
I often wonder how the locals see this world that I travel occasionally. I realized one day that people on the highways around town see it very different. The tourist who is in San Antonio for the first time is confused by the octopus exchanges where several major highways meet. They are busy trying to find their way. Locals are so familiar that they practically get from one place to another with little thought. Do the locals even notice the changes? They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but I think in many cases familiarity breeds apathy. When we know something so well, we simply stop paying attention.
Thankfully, God does not stop paying attention. He knows us better than we know ourselves, but He does not stop loving us or seeing everything about our life. There might be times when we wish that God would travel by us without seeing the changes that have occurred, but we can rest in the knowledge that even when God sees something that makes Him sad, He is faithful to His promises of forgiveness and mercy.
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