The toy car principle: How to move forward

Like every red-blooded American boy, I loved to play with toy cars. Hot wheels, big wheels, it didn’t matter. If it was a car or truck, you could bet I would play with it. Those cars could keep me out of trouble and out of my mom’s hair for hours on end. For my sixth birthday I received a green John Deer peddle tractor with a wagon. Oh the countless hours I spent riding it in the house and in my yard. I imagined I was a farmer who was working out in the fields, planting crops in the spring and harvesting them in the fall.For Christmas one year my brother got me a figure eight race track with what looked like two wheels coming from both sides at the starting line. There was a motor that would spin the two wheels at a fast pace, so when you pushed the car through the two wheels, it had enough speed to complete a lap on its own. When the car completed a lap, it would go through the wheels again and start all over. I had a ton of fun with my race track, just watching the car go around the track over and over again. It was good entertainment for a kid.I also recall having one of those cars where when you pulled it backward and let go, it raced forward. When I pulled it back and let go, my dog Daisy would try to chase it across the living room floor. I would tell Daisy to stop because I wanted to see it go clear across the room. Sometimes my one brother and I would lay on opposite sides of a room. I would make the car go toward him, and when he got it, he would do likewise. It was hours of fun for us.I was recently thinking about that toy car you have to pull back in order to have it go forward on its own, and I found those little cars are a great illustration of life. How many of us feel like we often take two steps backward for every one forward? I know sometimes I do. We try and try so hard to get ahead in life, only to have it blow up in our face. No matter how careful our best-laid plans are, something always seems to throw us for a loop. We can plan, save, invest and write every step out; yet, no matter how much we plan and try to cover our bases, the unexpected happens. We go one step forward and two steps back. We can’t win.How depressing it is going around, feeling like we can’t win. It’s enough to make a person lose his/her mind. Yet, the toy car principle states: we must go backward sometimes in order to launch into our destiny. No one ever did anything great or worthwhile without having a few hiccups along the way. We can look at great men and women throughout history, and if we dig below the surface, we find people who struggled to get to where they ended up.Look at Abraham Lincoln. He was just a backwoods county lawyer. The only thing he was good at was losing elections. Just for the record, he lost eight elections. There are accounts of his younger years that suggest his friends removed sharp objects from his environment because they thought he might be suicidal. Sounds like a man destined for greatness, right? Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper because of his lack of imagination, according to his boss. Thomas Edison was told his was too stupid to learn; yet, those are the people who we look up to today. They had to go backward in order to be catapulted into their destiny.We often look at famous people’s failures and say to ourselves, “That was them, and this is me,” which is a self-defeating line of thinking. We often don’t take into account how difficult their journey was. We act like they never had any failures at all, like they where some kind of superhero. When in reality, they were average human beings who never gave up. We use the phrase, “That was them, and this is me,” as a cop-out not to go on with our dream. When we run into difficult situations, instead of plowing through them, we give up and say, “It’s too hard.” Nothing worthwhile will ever come easy to us. It takes hard work and determination to make dreams a reality.In the moments we feel like we are going backward and feel as if we are left with no hope, those are the times when we need to trust God more than ever. Without God we are lost, and without hope we are done for. Hope is the basis for the future, but the future is rooted in God. One of my favorite passages in the word of God is found in Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” I wonder sometimes if we ever take the time and really ask him why it is we feel like we are going backward in our lives.He loves us beyond what we can ever comprehend; yet, we still don’t ask him while we go through a rough patch. To me it is not questioning him, but it is trying to understand his will and purpose for a specific period of life. For example, if he is trying to teach us something, we can make ourselves more open to the lessons he wants us to learn by being patient and waiting. God has a purpose for all things in our lives, and he will eventually make it known to us in his timing if we just simply ask him.I find I need to learn more first if I feel like I am going backward. This can be a hard pill to swallow, but we need to take a step back on occasions and take inventory of ourselves. When we are trying to advance ourselves into new territory, it takes a lot of research and studying to go off into the great unknown. Lack of knowledge can throw us backward faster than we think. Study up on what you want to embark on. Talk to people who have been there and see if you can get an idea of what’s ahead. Ask them what went right and what went wrong. Also, talk to people who have failed at what you want to do. See if you can find out where things went wrong for them in order to not make the same mistakes.The toy car principle is a helpful reminder to all of us. We may not like it, but sometimes we must go backward in order to move forward. It’s not the end of the world to go backward. In fact it can be the one thing that can make us or break us.