red light, green light

(originally posted 4/27/08)

Again, the Everaard family has taught me a huge lesson that I am posting in my Lesson Learned. This weekend, Brandon and I went to a conference in Owasso called All Church Ministries Conference. It is a conference for all department heads in your church. We went basically because Brandon had done a lot of graphics work for the conference and so they had a hotel room for us and we sort of used it as a weekend getaway. We did some shopping and hung out with friends. It was fun! On the first night, we were on our way to the evening service and we rode to the church with Doug and Jill. We were at a stoplight and Doug said "is that next stoplight up there out?" We all looked to the next stoplight and sure enough it looked like it was out. You couldn't see any light coming out of it at all. Then Jill said "I think you'll be able to see it when you get closer to it." As our light turned green and we drove closer to the next stoplight, just as Jill had predicted the Red light came into view and the color became clear.

Lesson Learned? As we all saw the light come into view Doug said "much like with God"...and he was soooo right. We so often look just up the next block and think that we will have no direction when we get there and we immediately freak out. We begin trying to find our own direction and thoughts cross our minds like "should I treat this as a 4-way stop" or "how long will it take me to get through this intersection without clear signals?" All of these thoughts bombard us and we don't even allow ourselves to get close enough to the intersection to find out for sure if the signal is even out. We do this exact same thing with God. We look a couple steps ahead and we assume that He has forgotten us or we refuse to take the next stop because we don't already know what the step after that will be. When in fact if we would just get closer to the intersection we would see that the light is working after all and direction is headed our way we just had to keep traveling the direction we knew we were supposed to go. Sure, the signal might come at the last minute but it will come. And yes, it might be a red light and not a green light but it's still a light and you can always be sure that if you come to a red light it won't stay red forever...