Ridin' on Faith

I have a decal on the back window of my truck that I mostly wish wasn't there. Most people miss it, I think, and I'm thankful for that. It's a cross with a bronco riding cowboy in front of it. Around the cross are the words, "Ridin' on Faith."

There are so many reasons I would never put that on my truck now. So many reasons. Guys who detail cars have given me lots of advice about how to get it off. I'm pretty sure they know their stuff and their recommendations would work.

Still, I choose to leave that decal on my truck, despite the fact it makes me cringe a little and despite the fact more than a few friends have made snarky comments about it. I leave it as a tangible reminder that we all have decisions we regret.

I was so excited to stick that decal on my truck when I was seventeen years old. Yes, I got the truck I still drive when I graduated high school. My best friend bought me the decal more than a year before and I tucked it away, waiting for the day when I would have a vehicle of my own to put it on.

The friend chose the decal well. I had a cowboy obsession, to put it mildly. I loved westerns and was especially fond of the illiterate poetry-writing cowboy with long hair in a short-lived television series based on a classic western. (For the record, he composed the poems in his head and had someone else write them down for him. I think his scribe was a prostitute/love interest.)

The friend who bought it and I grew up in the same conservative tradition. I was baptized by the youth minister from her church; she was the closest thing I had to family who was there that night. We carried our Bibles with us most every day. We led our school's morning devotion group.

Both the faith and the cowboy were good choices for the younger version of me. Still, I cringe when I notice the decal.

The cowboy obsession has long since died away. Well, mostly. My faith has morphed into something radically different than it was more than a decade ago. I would never make the same choice now. Actually, there's a whole variety of cringe-worthy decisions I could talk about from my teens. Well, probably my 20s, too. Undoubtedly, the same will be true for most every decade I encounter.

In some ways, that decal is incredibly insignificant. Still, it reminds me to forgive. I'm lucky that most of the decisions I made that I now regret did not end disastrously. For the most part, people look at my life and say, "She's got it together."

And I say, "I'm lucky." The drug dealers left me alone because I got good grades. It was a small high school. They never would have dared to offer me, well, anything. I was mostly unscathed by the stupid way that people with brand new driver's licenses handle a car. I could name a long list of things that, with one small change in the chain of events, would have meant police, or terrible injuries, or who knows what else. Maybe that's at the very core of, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

I don't know if I'll always get to say that. I know for certain a lot of people end up having to live with consequences for the same things I did unscathed.

So I leave that objectionable reminder on the back of my truck and remember that God is still present, still shoving, still calling us to new places and new things. And thanks be to God for that.