Are you your own red light?

Just a quick thought on something I have been noticing lately:

I do not think it is a coincidence that about 90% of the time, when pulling up to a stop light, I get the green light right away. I also do not believe this is some special gifting I have or a magic force that is with me. I believe it is because I am intentional with how I stop.

Once I started noticing my ability to get green lights, I started to observe the behaviors of other people, to try and get an understanding on why I always get so "lucky." I see cars sitting and waiting for several minutes. They are probably in a hurry to get somewhere and are thinking they have all the bad luck. I'm sure they sit there asking "Why am I stuck waiting again?"

What I learned, through observation, is that the majority of those cars waiting an extra amount of time at the light have not pulled all the way up to the stop line. They are waiting for their permission to move forward but haven't pulled up far enough to register that they are there. I assume that they are just trying to be careful and cautious to not pull up too far, avoiding risk of injury or punishment. The problem is, the line is painted on the road as a guide to help drivers know where they need to be if they want a turn to proceed, but they are not approaching the line with confidence. Or for some, they are simply not paying enough attention to notice where they are in relation to the line.

I feel that I get green lights because I pull up all the way. I am intentional about where I place my car, knowing that position does play a part in how long I have to wait.

Do you ever feel like you are sitting at a red light in your life? You are waiting for progress to happen, some kind of forward momentum, but you are just sitting there? You may need to get more intentional about where you are placing yourself.

God is waiting for us to come to Him and to communicate with Him. Phillipians 4:6 says to "....make your requests known to God," just the same as our car needs to put in a "request" to the light. However,there will be an aweful lot of waiting around if we assume we will get a green light just because we are in the proximity of the line. The definition of sin is missing the mark. Isaiah 59:1 and 2 says that our sin gets in our way of God being able to hear us when we pray. There is a break in the communication because we have settled for proximity rather than precision. We must be on the "line", hitting the mark, for God to hear our requests and grant the momentum we so deeply desire.


Are you your own red light? Is there something in your life that is distracting you from pulling all the way up? Perhaps you are like many people who just stopped paying attention to your positon. You might need to take a look at where you are. It's time to start being aware of what we are doing and being intentional about how we make our approach. There are times it might feel like we are waiting way too long for God to give us a green light, but we only have a red because we have not positioned ourselves where our request can be heard. Proximity is not good enough. Strive for precision.

The Way I See It

Have you ever worn a pair of sun glasses that distort your depth perception, just enough, that you misjudge where you are in relation to something else? Maybe they skew the size or color of an object, causing you to see it wrong? This was me last Thursday. I was wearing some "movie star" sun glasses that stick out a little too far on my face. Because of this, I accidentially opened the car door and hit myself square in the forehead. It was not only embarrassing but I ended up in the ER with a concussion. A head injury, because I wasn't able to judge the true position of the door. It wasn't that I wasn't looking at the door, for once, I WAS paying attention. It also had nothing to do with a lack of knowing how to open the door properly.

Like most of you, I've opened doors a million times in my life without this problem. The knock to the head really got me thinking about how the whole experience really has a life lesson to apply to life in general. You see, it absolutely matters what lenses we wear when dealing with life. Are you wearing lenses of bitterness or anger? How about fear, depression, worthlessness, hopelessness? If you continually look at life through the shades of these emotions, you will find out that you aren't seeing things as they truely are. I was able to see the car door, know it was a car door, and know what to expect from it, but because of the distortion of my sight, I was not able to see the door in it's true position. I assumed I saw it exactly as it was, but I was wrong. It smacked me in the face.

Your world can be skewed by the things that are keeping you from clear vision. How do we see clearly? How do we see things exactly in their true position? We wear the lenses of God. We look at the world through His eyes, with His perspective. John 14:6 says "I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life...." If Jesus is THE truth, then the only way to have a correct view of the stuff around us is to have His view. When we start throwing our own perspective and our own ideas in the mix, we start messing with our ability to judge where we are in relation to the life we live. Good intentions and knowledge do not help when our glasses are messing up the way we see life.

The consequence is a spiritual "concussion" of sorts. A real concussion is actually more of a neurological injury than a physical brain injury. That means that a good whack to the head makes your brain freak out and forget how to work for some time. There is even the possibility that it can damage enough to change you completely as a person. Your brain can actually start functioning differently then it did before the injury. We can apply this to our life as well. The more we are looking at the world through a skewed perspective, the more times we are going to get "hit in the face" with the reality we are not able to see. If you get hit enough, it can actually change who you are. If you constantly look at life through the lenses of disappointment, the more you are going to get hit with disappointment. And the longer you live, not able to see the truth, the more likely you will stay that way.

Think of the bitter cranky people that you know. They were not born bitter. Their circumstances have shaped their perception of life and they have slowly let bitterness creep into the very make-up of who they are. Had they only been able to stop at some point in life, remove the bitter glasses, and look at life through the eyes of the One who created them in His image. 2 Corinthians 4:18 says "So we don't look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever." We can not look past the troubles of the present if we are unable to remove the distortion on our eyes. What we are looking through matters. Choose to view the world in the clarity and truth of Christ.


And yes, I got all of that out of opening the door on my face.  ;)