Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, November 22, 2025
Farm kids like me were taught to drive earlier than city kids. I learned not from a driver’s ed class but from a nervous farmer-father whose already heavy worry-load would become super-crushing during the months after he’d taught me (often in a loud, tense voice) all he knew about motor vehicle operation and defensive driving.
A couple of weeks ago, on my usual post-breakfast walk of nearly a mile, a wave of nostalgia swept over me as I noticed these two cars parked beside a sidewalk. The street descends slightly at this point, toward the camera, and I saw that these vehicles’ drivers had both cranked the wheels into the curb, so that in case the brakes failed, the car would roll not out into the street but up and over the sidewalk toward the lawn.
I remembered my own dad sternly explaining this to me, and such was his earnestness that I have always done this, without fail. Even if there’s scarcely any slope at all, I crank the wheels. And if the slope goes up, I crank the wheels the other way.
Fear, of course, was what led Dad to be so paranoid. His fear arose directly from love – mainly love to me, but also a caring for anyone who might be in the path of a heedless and insufficiently respectful young Maylan. And fear, of course, is what drives our Heavenly Father to make as sure as we can that we’re prepared for a dangerous world.
The Bible has some sobering yet ultimately comforting truths about fear. At this link you’ll discover some of them.