Red Light, Green Light

As I sat in the dark watching the cars stop and start at the four-way traffic light, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between what was happening in front of me and my spiritual journey. God has me at a red light right now. I wonder when the waiting will end, when it will be my turn to go forward, to turn, to at least move. Watching the cars stop and go I realized just how close everyone was away from a fatal crash. If one car went when it wasn’t its turn it wouldn’t have been good for that car or the one it hit. It wouldn’t have been good for anyone not to have waited.

But waiting on God is hard. It feels like it would just be easier if you knew how long the wait would be. At least with traffic lights you know your turn will come around sometime. That is unless the light is broken and in that case it really was supposed to be your turn, but the system just didn’t work right. I wonder if that is part of it. We do live in a broken, messed up world and even though our master engineer works beautiful things out of the junk the fact is that sometimes things just don’t work right.

One thing I heard recently was the idea that we shouldn’t always wait for green lights. God is more in the business of giving us red lights to protect us, but he wants us to move forward in faith, so maybe sometimes we’re sitting at an intersection and it doesn’t have any signals. Sometimes we’re just supposed to go. How do we know? Well if our eyes are open and we’re not color blind we’ll see the red lights.  We won’t be able to miss them. In other cases the rules for stopping and going at intersections are more discretionary.

A harder question though is how do we know if something is always going to be a red light and we need to go another way or if at some point it will turn green? How long do we wait before we move in another direction? Is the red light a barrier that won’t come down or just a light on a timer, like the one that I witnessed in action beautifully conducting traffic. Timing, God’s timing is mysterious.

Recently I moved from a house that was a very short distance from where I work to a house that has tripled my commute time. Though it is hardly a distance to complain about I have found myself waiting at more traffic lights than usual and it has reminded me of my impatience. For me, I think I usually give up on waiting before things have fully been birthed. I rush ahead thinking this must be it, only to have my hopes disappointed.  How long can I sit and wait and not do, just be? Can I wait or must I always rush ahead? I want to wait. I want to be ok in this place of not knowing what or when or where or how or even whom? I want to wait at this light for a little while longer even though it is hard.

"Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, 'The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait patiently for him.' The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD." - Lamentations 3:21-26