Driving While Anonymous

My MINI has been in the shop all week, first in Lynchburg and then in Richmond.  So, for the past 5 days, I’ve been driving a rental car.
A white Toyota Corolla.
I’ve driven a lot of rental cars on vacations and business trips, and I usually miss my MINI’s performance—even just the joy of stick-shift driving.
But this week brought a different sentiment to the uninspiring rental car experience.  This week, I wasn’t renting a car from a distant airport.  This week, I was driving four wheels’ worth of milquetoast on roads I drive everyday.
For the first time in a long time, I felt anonymous in the drivers seat.  I knew I wouldn’t hear, “Hey, I saw you—well, your MINI—the other day.”  (I get that on a regular basis, thanks to my flashy vinyl wrap.)
That incognito feeling grew more noticeable to me on Wednesday night, as I left church.  I waved at people, but they didn’t know it was me.  I pulled up to my buddy, David, and asked, “How do you like my new wheels?”
“It’s not you,” he answered.  He was right.
Five years ago this month, I joined my church’s parking team.  I’ve always remembered people by what they drove, and this ministry has allowed me to leverage that odd recollection for kingdom work.  Because I know literally hundreds of people by their cars and people know me by mine (or my reflective safety gear), I’ve too often assumed that people felt known—or at least authentically welcomed—when they get out of their vehicles on Sunday morning.
That’s not good.
In the ten minutes before the service and five minutes after it starts—when four-doored vehicles are pouring through our lots like water in a March-raised creek—it’s easy to go into assembly line mode.  We move with traffic and available spaces.  We wave with our free hands and point to available spots with our others.  We call out to drivers about to open their doors to oncoming neighbors.  It’s efficient.  It’s safe.  It’s still more personal than what they get on the asphalt at other churches.
But it’s not enough.
Somehow, I’ve got to raise my game—and contagiously inspire my teammates to raise theirs—to find a way to make as many drivers and passengers as possible feel truly welcomed.  Somehow, it has to get past repetitive greeting and generic smiles.  Somehow, we’ve got to get past the anonymity, the ignorance, the generic friendliness.
In many cases we do.  We regularly have people that say we make their morning.  Others thank us for what we do; some even bring us refreshments.  It’s good to see the smiles and chuckles on the other side of windshields.
It’s the ones we miss—those hidden in their white Toyota Corrollas, if you will—that I will hopefully see more clearly now.  It’s those I’ll be looking for tomorrow from 8:00-8:45am.
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