My missionary assignment in Fleet Management is far different than anything else I have done in life. As a designer in the theatre, my days were flexible and varied. I enjoyed the creativity. I had a comfortable office and daily interaction with other creative individuals. True, I mostly lived out my career in the basement of the Fine Arts Center close to stage without a window to the outside world, but life as a lighting designer involved artificial illumination anyway. As a missionary, I’m confined to a cubicle in the furthest reaches of the office. There are windows in the office and a dozen lucky employees can gaze out from the 14th floor overlooking Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City. My space, my cubicle called the corral, is isolated and alone.

I support the GPS device that is placed in junior missionary vehicles throughout North America, an inventory of about 10,000 vehicles. The purpose of the device is to save lives and protect church property. In today’s world, we’re all familiar with the benefits of using GPS mapping to find our destination by the quickest route. I can remember when first learning to drive in the 1970’s and navigating across the country with an atlas balanced on my knee. The atlas gave me general instructions to my destination, but not a lot of information about the time of my arrival, road conditions, and mileage saving shortcuts. There are certainly advantages to today’s technology, but I also miss the simplicity of that handy old atlas.

I learned a valuable lesson in parenting from my GPS mapping program backed by the helpful voice of Siri a few years ago. I was in Idaho Falls, Idaho at a Costco, and I wanted to return to my family in Rigby. I usually enjoy backroads more than a more direct highway route, and so I used Siri to help me find my way across the farmlands of central Idaho. I tapped the instructions into my iPhone and trusted Siri to get me home. Along the way, I missed a turn and immediately noticed Siri going to work rerouting my path and finding an alternate route with a different turn several miles down the road. Before long I was pulling into the driveway, and all was well. What did Siri teach me about parenting from this experience? When I sat down to write in my journal that night, I commented that I want to learn to parent like Siri. When I made a mistake and missed a turn, she didn’t jump on my back and call me an idiot. I wasn’t mocked, belittled, or punished. She simply found an alternate route. The destination remained the same, the road to get there was all that was different. With just that one piece of parenting advice, I probably would have been a much better father. Far too often in my parental role of raising children, I thought I knew the only way to arrive at the destination, and I wasn’t open to the possibility of an alternate route. Kids make mistakes in the teenage years, and so do dads. How much better I could have helped my children by taking a pause while my internal gears spun in circles calculating an alternate route and helping the kids find the next best turn. It probably would have been a more joyful experience.

These devices in the missionary cars give additional audible instructions while they drive. They’re a bit like having Mom in the passenger seat. It’s not Siri’s voice, but another womanly utterance saying, “check your speed”, or reminding the driver of, “aggressive driving”. There are great life lessons here as well. Perhaps the most obvious is the advantage of that still small voice that whispers in our ear instructions that keep us from harm’s way. In church parlance that is the voice of the Holy Ghost. When our lives are in order, we benefit greatly from those nonverbal prompts to beware and be careful.

The prompt to check my speed is one I need constant reminding of. Not that I drive fast. I usually obey the speed limit and rely on adaptive cruise control (ah, what an ingenious invention is adaptive cruise control). Too often my speed through life is far too quick, and I need the reminder to slow down. Now that I no longer have work related deadlines there really isn’t reason to go fast and furious. Life unfolds slowly and sometimes even imperceptibly. And I don’t just need to move slower, but also with intention. I want to be deliberate with life and focus more on those around me, that which is most important.

I have to laugh when I’m reminded of aggressive driving. The prompt from the GPS that reminds missionaries they are driving a little too aggressively is perhaps one of the greatest nuances of life that they could learn from at this early stage. The worst damage, the cause of the most pain I’ve felt on my journey through mortality has come about by reckless, thoughtless, insensitive, and selfish behavior. If I were granted any do-over, it would be for the sole purpose of reliving the moments that I was simply practicing “aggressive driving” in my interactions with others. Apply the brakes more gently, avoid hard swerves, don’t spin the wheels at takeoff, and most importantly, watch out for bumps along the way. Am I writing about driving a car or navigating through life? In many ways it’s all the same.