It was one of those blazing hot summer days. As his car headed past the pine trees and scorched earth of south Georgia, he could hardly tell that he even had his sunglasses on, that is, until he lifted them a bit and was almost blinded by the glare.

The trip was tedious. There were few other cars on the road, almost as if the locals had sense enough not to be out at that time of day. The radio, set to scan, jumped from one twangy gospel station to another before he noticed that it had mindlessly run through them all twice. He turned it off and rode with only the sound of the hot air blowing by. He didn’t think. The car was on cruise control; the road was straight through the flat fields. He sat, his mind blank, and let the road take him.

Finally he began to get sleepy. He needed a distraction. He looked at the tapes lying on the empty seat beside him. One he had paid good money for. It was recorded by a motivational speaker. All his co-workers were talking about it, about how it had increased their productivity. The other tape was free, a gift from a friend. He popped the motivational speaker in the tape deck.

It grabbed him from the start; he could see why his co-workers recommended it. "You have to decide right now what your life is going to mean," the energetic voice said.

Are you going to be content to go through your life not realizing your goals, not reaching your earning potential, not getting the respect and admiration of your peers, or are you willing to make changes in your life, starting this day, so that you can maximize your efficiency and optimize your competency on the road to success and riches in your life?

"You have to decide," the confident voice said. "Success is yours for the taking." He was hooked. The fields, the fences choked with honeysuckle, the patches of trees, even the time, all flew by as he hung onto the words which were speaking to him, which somehow knew that he could earn more, that he did deserve a promotion, that he had never really reached his potential. The voice went on:

You need to learn how to actualize your potential to serve your goal of advancement in your business. Right now, you can prosper if you follow these steps. First, you must believe that by realizing your full potential you can achieve your goal of success. You must think of yourself as a prosperous person. You must believe that you can achieve your goal of success if you realize your full potential.

"Once you have gained the confidence that you have what it takes to be successful," the voice said,

you can move to the second step and begin to access the tremendous potential that is inside you, the potential that you know you have, that you can feel you have, and that you have never been able to access before. And you access this potential by staying focused on your goal of living a better life, a more comfortable life, a life in which you live with all the trappings of the good life that you have always admired in others – cars, houses, cash, expensive clothes, travel – all the things success brings. The second step is to imagine the good life you want for yourself, and stay focused on the goal of achieving it. Turn the tape off now, and imagine the good life you want for yourself.

He did. And it was good. It was very good. Finally, flushed with his imagined success, he hit the "play" button again. The voice, his friend, came back:

Good. You are now ready for the third step. After you have taught yourself that you can achieve your goals by actualizing your potential (step one), and after you have learned to stay focused on your goal of success (step two), your next step is to achieve the success you want by taking a fearless inventory of your life and asking of every part of it, ‘Is this part of my life, and the way I am living it, promoting my goal of success achieved through self actualization?

The hot road (full of mirages in the shimmering heat) slipped by without notice as the voice went on about the need to be courageous, to be willing to change important aspects of your life, to be willing to take risks, to acknowledge that there are no "neutral" areas--everything either promotes the goal or hinders it--to "think outside the box," to manage those around you so that they may promote your career. And all of it, he was reminded ("You must stay focused," the voice said again and again), all of it was in the service of step number two (the goal of living an affluent, successful life), and all of it was inspired by step number one (the belief that by realizing your full potential you can achieve your goal of success).

Finally, who knows how much later?, his new friend said good-bye and wished him great luck and riches on his road to success. He was sorry the tape was over. For a while he rode in silence, thinking about his life and about his goals.

After a while, he looked at the other tape on the seat beside him. A friend had given it to him. He hadn’t wanted to take it, but he didn’t want to be rude, so he acted grateful and threw it in the car. His friend was "religious," and this was a tape of a sermon the friend said he had liked. "Oh, well," he thought, "at least I can tell him I listened to it."

"Jesus," the preacher said, "calls for us to make a choice." "Yeah, yeah," the man thought. "Jesus says to each of us," the preacher went on, "You have to decide right now what your life is going to mean." The man was startled. He hit the "pause" button. Was this tape beginning with the same line that the other tape began with? He hit "rewind," then "play": "You have to decide right now what your life is going to mean." "Son-of-a-gun" he thought.

And then he heard about a radically different vision of life, about a life in which everyone is respected, about a life in which no one is treated badly because of any condition they were born with, about dedicating your life to proclaiming the name of Christ, about voluntary sacrifice, about actually giving money away (not because you have to, but out of gratitude), about willingly putting yourself in positions that would be detrimental to you, that could make you poor, that could ("and would," the preacher said) get you hurt, that would not be comfortable. Apparently Jesus had said, "If you want to become my followers, deny yourselves and take up your cross, your instrument of shame and pain, daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it."

When the tape was over, he sat there as the asphalt flew under him. He could see the choice the two tapes offered: to claim one’s life for oneself, to make it work for you, to make one’s life serve one’s goals, or (he surprised himself by how religious he sounded) to give over one’s life as an offering. For reasons he could not identify or understand, he found it difficult to dismiss the ridiculous second option.

In the distance, wavering in the heat, was a fork in the road. He wasn’t familiar with the route, and he didn’t know which way to go. As he approached the fork, he got more and more anxious, hoping a sign would tell him which way to go. No such luck. Then as he came to the fork, it became clear to him, and he laughed as he thought, "I wonder how many of these forks I take every day."