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One summer I took a special trip with my three youngest children.
We flew to Denver, Colorado, where we planned to hop into a rental car, drive 200 miles into the Rockies (where someone had graciously loaned us the use of their condo), then fly back to Indiana five days later.
There was just one problem when I walked up to the rental counter in the Denver airport.
My driver’s license had expired seven days earlier.
None of my children were authorized to drive anything larger than a Matchbox car.
We were now all alone, with no one to meet us, no one expecting us, and Uber still a distant dream. Would a rental agent overlook the rules to save the day? It quickly dawned on me there was no chance that would ever happen.
My kids kept looking at me and asking, “Daddy, why is this part taking so long?”
Then something wonderful happened.
I called the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Indiana – which is not normally associated with wonderful happenings – and I was told that Hoosier residents had a grace period to renew their driver’s license until the end of their birthday month. For two more weeks, I was a legal driver.
The man at the rental counter had never heard of such a thing, and he waited (and kept a rather close eye on me) until the BMV sent a fax confirming my status.
Minutes later we were driving off toward the mountains.
I should mention, for your planning purposes, that the very next year the state of Indiana eliminated the birthday month grace period, apparently to align with the rest of the nation.
The events of that day – being stuck at the counter – have stuck with me for a long time now. They provide a great reminder.
Some people have concluded that God is obligated to keep open a permanent window of grace. That’s his job, right? Isn’t grace God’s invention to bail out people who just haven’t gotten around to investing in a relationship with him, just as I hadn’t gotten around to making sure I was licensed to drive?
God’s grace is spectacular. There’s a reason it’s called “amazing.”
But it’s a profound mistake to think that we can keep stonewalling God, pushing him away until some future time when we’ll finally give spiritual growth a second thought.
Not that God’s grace will change between now and then.
The real danger is that something in us will change.
It’s entirely possible that we will succumb to one of our culture’s many distractions. Slowly but surely, we will cease caring about whether God is even worth knowing.
That’s why Isaiah 55:6 is one of the most urgent verses in the Bible: “Seek God while he’s here to be found; pray to him while he’s close at hand.” Why? Because God is a moving target, and he likes to play hard to get?
No, it’s because we are no different from the rest of humanity. All of us are afflicted with spiritual attention deficit disorder.
We must pursue God now for the simple reason that we might never again be as open to his grace as we are today.
There’s an incredible trip ahead of us.
Don’t get stuck at the rental counter because you never got around to being spiritually renewed.