New Light

Twilight was beginning to descend on the countryside out my car window as I drove back from working in a town in the north section of my district. I reached to turn the knob on my dash for the headlights and then stopped to look at the vertical selector knob to its right. Of course it wasn't anything new, it had been there the whole time. I don't know how many times in all the nearly 30,000 miles I had sat behind that wheel I had seen the rolling selector knob mutely staring at me from the dashboard .

But for some reason I never used it...not even once. For a few seconds I put my hand back on the wheel and watched the fall colors whiz past in the glory of the last rays of the October sun. I tried to remember what that knob was supposed to do. I wasn't sure. I'd never used it. Why? I wasn't sure of that either. Presumably because I thought I already knew everything the car did. Or maybe it was because I when I went down the checklist of locating all the necessary functions of my car (brakes, windshield wipers, stereo volume, etc.) I found everything I thought I needed--before encountering that odd little vertical selector knob.

I looked back at the knob. It could have been a brand-new addition to my dashboard for all practical purposes. Obviously, since I had been driving thousands of miles without it, it was rather insignificant. That or it was an emergency activation switch to launch my car into oblivion.

Was that to deter me? Of course not. My initial incredulity at the realization that there was actually something about my car I didn't know only stunned me for a second, and then I reached forward again to experiment with my discovery.

Tick. The knob rolled up to a level even with a small white circle beside it. I stared at my dashboard in disbelief and then laughed. For two years I had wondered why, whenever my headlights were on, my dash lights would dim to almost no visibility. A simple flick of selector knob, and suddenly my dash lit up, as bright as the Fourth of July, except in neon green only.

Pushing the selector up one more level added an overhead light that otherwise operated separately. Imagine that. Not only did the knob resolve a known problem, it added an entirely new capability.

For the next several minutes I drove along quietly admiring all my new lights. I couldn't help smiling when I thought how long I'd driven my car without ever trying that particular knob.

Then I thought of my Bible study contacts. I thought of all the people who turn down studying the Bible because they've "already read it from cover to cover." And I drove my car for 30,000 miles thinking I knew everything there was to know about how to operate it. Guess what--there just might be some new light you didn't already know about.