on the go
This four-lane road, the last main thoroughfare before Adam and I get to school, snakes about in hills and curves sometimes tightly compressed and sometimes stretched and rising. It’s a good analogy for life, this drive, for the way we all get pushed and pressed, the way a day can feel like a long, blind ascent around a bend.
“Safe, safe,” Adam says, in the kind of soothing tone I would use with a small child. His fingers gently, almost soundlessly, tap against the car window. As usual, worship has absorbed him. Even though Adam is a person of few spoken words, his heart is full of songs.
In the shelter of your presence; in the shadow of your wings, I am safe; I am safe. The lyric turns with us, gliding over the roadway.
The name of this road, Wade, suggests some sort of slow descent into something, but in fact the always heavy traffic here moves quickly, usually too quickly, rising in defiance of the speed limit. There are always the drivers who drive as though we’re all trapped inside some competitive video game, the ones who race up behind and slide recklessly in and out of the lanes behind and in front of us.
The wild rushing of the place leaves me feeling overwhelmed. At a stoplight, I release the steering wheel and flex my fingers. Adam looks out the window beside him, gazing at the blooming trees and their petaled shadows dotting the sidewalk, and I realize that he is completely at rest while still on the move with me. He trusts me, and I am in charge of forward progress.
“That could be a painting,” I muse, following Adam’s line of sight, remembering that it matters where I rest my eyes.
A silver-headed lady grabs her dog by the collar as a sweat-slick runner jets by, and those petals at their feet begin to dance in the breeze, kicked up by their feet.
The light turns, and we are off again. There’s a bottleneck ahead of us, where four curving lanes and all those spinning wheels converge, squeezed together so tightly we have no choice except to slow down. In a car, this predicament seems obvious, that hurry can easily lead to hurt when we rush through, hard-pressed on every side. As the strain for space drags traffic to a crawl, Adam instinctively shifts his attention to the road again.
“Uh oh,” he says significantly.
It’s funny how a change of pace, no matter how welcome or how important, can feel like a mistake.
My sister-friends and I laugh about this, the feeling of warning that often arises when we slow way down long enough to ease our hands open and breathe deeply, to stand at a window and notice something beautiful, something that happens without any contribution of our own, something entirely beyond us. A foreboding question niggles in the back of our minds, something like, what am I not doing that I should be, as though being still should never be something that occupies our time.
“You’re okay,” I say to Adam, patting his knee with one hand. “We just have to go slow because there’s not much space.”
He studies my face a moment, and finding no signs of alarm, returns to worship and watching the world.
We have to go slow because there’s not much space. As soon as I say those words, I wonder why we can feel overwhelm and stress about the lack of margin in our lives and never acknowledge the need to stop rushing about. We can be blind to the risk of hurting each other with our hurry.
Whoever thought a bottleneck could be a good thing? Most of us don’t like to slow down much anymore, let alone stop, and yet, as Adam and I carefully wind our way along, I realize that this is the pace that sharpens my attention and draws my gaze away from myself. My limitations always remind me that self-reliance and self-absorption are a scam. Be still and know that I am, God says. Keep a Sabbath of rest and know that I am the Lord.
In the roadway, right in the cramped clog, traffic in two lanes completely stops. An eighteen-wheeler inches across both lanes onto the road from the parking lot of a business that sits on the curve just where the road begins another climb. Where little margin exists, something will always come along to steal away the little that remains.
I drop my hands, open, in my lap, and maybe I sigh in prayer, or maybe I say His Name right out loud—Jesus–over the cramping of the day, the snarl of traffic, the forced stop, because Adam turns to me, as if in response, and gently, tenderly, repeats, “Safe, safe.”
