How to Regain Control When You're Skidding

I step into the familiar scent of fresh-cut field and I’m no longer walking a shoulder-less, one-lane Kentucky road but in the back pasture of the hobby farm in Minnesota where I spent most of my childhood. I remember this plot well. It’s where we teetered on a hay wagon till 10 pm, skinny arms struggling to heave hay bales into a stack that would withstand hills and sharp turns.

It’s also where I white-knuckled the steering wheel of an old, blue truck as my dad taught me how to regain control of a skidding vehicle. (Can’t remember if that was after an icy road encounter or the time I flipped my car on wet gravel.)

Between home and this pasture, mud squelched between boots while you picked your way across the biggest grass tufts. Most of the time you avoided the land beyond the swap. It wasn’t scenic or convenient. But isn’t that where life lessons best sprout?

Preparing for Next Time

I remember how small and untethered I felt in the driver’s seat of that truck. It was a single, cloth-covered bench that seemed too wide for a lane of road. Near my knee was the dreaded manual shift. Even the pedals seemed to swallow my feet when I pressed the clutch to the floor.

Fear swallowed me too. Make the tires skid on purpose? I didn’t want to relive trees whipping the wrong way past the windows. Didn’t want to remember the eerie not-knowing-what-comes-next or standing shaky-legged after.

Not a single bone in my body needs the thrill of speed. I’d rather stand on solid ground than ride a roller coaster, parasail in Mexico, or feel the quiver of a horse at full gallop beneath me. It’s a tall ask to initiate the spin so I can learn to control it.

It’s a tall ask to initiate the spin so I can learn to control it (Twyla Franz quote).

But sometimes that’s where we are, sandwiched between past and future, fearing both. So we do the hard thing. We re-create what we want to forget so we’re better prepared next time.

Face the Fear

In order to get the truck to spin, I had to go faster. Press the gas pedal like I meant business. Speed up when I wanted to slow it all down.

There’s a lesson here: when I want to detour, delay, or dismiss, instead embrace the fear. Face it with eyes open and hands on the steering wheel.

As I remember my dad’s calm presence in the passenger seat, I think of Jennifer Dukes Lee’s nudge to picture Jesus as a driver’s ed coach rather than a chauffeur. She writes in It’s All Under Control,

Of course, as Carrie Underwood will sing to you, Jesus is definitely taking the wheel. But make no mistake. There are times when he’s going to ask you to do some driving . . . He’s there to teach you the rules of the road.

Sometimes it takes more trust to place our shaky hands on the wheel and trust God when He says to speed up or turn the wheel the opposite direction you want to go than to slide into the passenger seat and let Him do the driving.

Trust Is Key to Regaining Control

Trust. That’s the lynchpin. Without a deep trust that God is in control, even when we’re buckled into the driver’s seat, we’ll skid off the path. Why? Because we’ll listen to fear over God’s voice. We’ll miss his patient coaching. Disbelieve that He knows the best way to regain control when the ground slides wiley beneath us.

When we trust or distrust ourselves too much, we take our focus off God and make ourselves more vulnerable. We’ll either overcorrect or approach ice entirely unprepared.

But trust that God knows the inner workings of the truck, the physics of controlling a skid, and what’s the very best for you in this moment, and you can take a deep breath and practice again.

Trust Takes Practice

Like all things worth learning, trust takes practice. And we best learn to trust Jesus when life shifts beneath us and we must cling to Him in order to stand.

Even-If Ground feels unsteady because everything might change. The loss may be inevitable. The miracle might not come in time. We grieve the falling apart that might come tomorrow, but there’s still a little comfort in it not being today. We have time to brace, to squeeze in more tear-lined prayers.

These uncertain seasons where we learn to hold tomorrow in open hands grow our ability to trust. The more we practice, the more muscle memory we develop.

But sometimes the nightmare is not a 50/50 chance. It’s not only inevitable, we’re in the middle of it. I call this Nevertheless Ground because it’s an opportunity to stand steadied by Jesus as we choose to praise Him anyways.

Nevertheless Ground is the sudden patch of black ice we didn’t choose. The unfixable, irreversible loss that dries your tongue and hits like a gut-punch. The diagnosis or divorce papers or foreclosure statement you can’t hand back.

Although we might question or cry or beg for it to be easier or over, on Nevertheless Ground, we draw strength from Jesus’s steady presence in the passenger seat. We listen to His voice reminding us what to do with the pedals and steering wheel, and it’s a voice we know, love, and trust.

A Prayer As We Practice

How do we regain control when we’re skidding on the razor’s edge of Even-If Ground or the black ice of Nevertheless Ground? We trust. We practice listening to Jesus’s voice when fear would make Him seem far away. And we talk about the driving lesson because others around us can draw strength from our learning-to-trust-God stories.

Let’s pray.

Jesus, You’re with us when we think it’s easy driving and when we’re suddenly scared and skidding across the road. We couldn’t ask for a better coach. Help us to trust You.

Just a friend over here in your corner,