On the road of life

Every once in a while as I’m leaving my house to go to work in the morning, the universe conspires against me and I have to wait for five or six cars to pass before I can get out of the driveway. Where is all of this traffic coming from? Those days add well over 30 seconds to my commute to Lovell. It’s infuriating; I’ve got places to be. All kidding aside, over the years, road trips have taught me a few things about life.

Last week my wife and I were visiting family in Denver. FYI, there are a few more cars than five or six. Most often when we visit my daughter, we travel back home on a Sunday morning and avoid too many cars on the road. However, this last time we encountered the most traffic that we have seen at that time.

I don’t mind driving on the freeway, but I sure wouldn’t want to do it every day. Even though it doesn’t really bother me, except when having to drive 10 mph for 20 minutes, I still find myself completely focused on all of the cars around me and in front of me. What are they going to do? Am I in their blind spot? Is there a motorcycle speeding by? I couldn’t wait to get past Cheyenne and enter the wide-open expanse of nothingness, and very few cars.

As we continued on our way home, I realized that while traveling through Wyoming, I was then able to just let my mind contemplate things. Even though it is tiring driving long distances, I was able to mull things over in my mind and just let thoughts, ideas and inspiration just kind of bounce around. When I recognized that, the phrase “Be still and know that I am God” came to mind (Psalms 46:10). We need to take more time to be still. Too often we are stuck in mental, emotional or spiritual traffic. There is so much going on and we become so hyper-focused on all of the commotion around us that we don’t allow God to get a word in.

I have traveled to Utah many times throughout my life. One of my favorite parts of the trip is a 20-mile section of I-80 east of Evanston. It is known as the Three Sisters. It consists of a stretch of three hills that rise to over 7,000 feet. On those uphill climbs there are three lanes to allow traffic to flow up those steep sections. Slower vehicles, mainly trucks, occupy the right two lanes because they can’t keep up their speed on a steep incline that long. The left lane is available for those vehicles that are able to make the climb more quickly. Nearing the top of those really long hills, it almost seems like those trucks or motor homes to the right are at a standstill as I pass them in my car.

The Three Sisters is also sometimes referred to as the Highway to Heaven as it seems in the distance to rise to the sky. Climbing those hills is a lot like us as we try to live our lives in a Christian manner. We are trying to get up life’s hills. They are long and steep. We sometimes have the tendency to look at ourselves or someone else and wonder why the progress is so slow.

For example, we may think that our neighbor down the street has everything going for him. He had a religious upbringing, he has a good job and a great family, but his progress is slow. On the outside, it may look like he is a big semi with a powerful engine, but he, or maybe it’s us, has a great load that nobody sees that is weighing him down. It may be a slow climb, but God doesn’t really care about the speed. As long as progress is being made, He is OK with that, because He knows of the load that is being carried. So don’t be too hard on your neighbor or yourself. Progress is progress. And the good news is that if we can reach the top with that load, however slow the climb may be, on the downhill side we can use it to our advantage. The trial or circumstance that holds us back for a time will seem to push us after we have overcome it.

A couple of years ago on another trip to Denver, I was keeping an eye on the weather reports to make sure we weren’t going to run into any snow. The days that we were going to be there were going to be fairly warm and partly sunny. But on the day we were traveling, there were going to be some high winds from Douglas to Fort Collins. As we left Casper, I saw the warning on the freeway signs of extreme gusty winds on I-25. From Douglas on, it said that the freeway was closed to light or high-profile vehicles. I was fighting the wind that whole stretch, but because we were in the car it wasn’t too bad.

As we got closer to Cheyenne, I noticed a couple of enclosed trailers that had been lifted off their hitches and dumped on the side of the road. On one of the exits in Cheyenne, there was a big pickup and one of those expensive horse trailers lying on their sides. As we approached the state line, there were eight to 10 semis blown onto their sides over the space of about five miles. The drivers of those trucks either got the info too late or decided that they could deal with the wind; they paid for it.

We live in a world where winds rage against us constantly. The adversary wants us off of the road and halted on our journey. We need to get to our destination, but what are we driving? Are we driving a high-profile rig, puffed up with pride and thinking that we have everything under control and are powerful enough to withstand the buffetings on our own? Or are we traveling with a low center of gravity, grounded in the scriptures and heeding the warnings so that we can arrive safely? Are we too proud to accept guidance, or are we humble enough to listen?

One more for the road... 

When I was a kid, riding in the car with my parents, I would wonder why the road wasn’t straight to the place we wanted to go. In my mind, I thought that there should be a road from Lovell to Billings, Lovell to Cody, Lovell to Salt Lake, etc., all without having to go through other towns. To me, it made a lot of sense. I couldn’t understand why the grownups didn’t grasp how easy it would be to travel with the map in my mind. There are a lot of reasons why roads are routed the way they are: there are many obstacles that need to be avoided between point A and point B, the ground may not be suitable to support traffic, maybe there is a point of interest that needs to be included on the route, and (against my road plan as a child) maybe other people need to go to point C.

We look at life and wonder why it can’t be just a straight path. Why so many twists and turns to get to our destination with God? On our journey, there are dangers that we need to avoid, things that we need to experience and people that we need to help along our way. 

Safe travels.

Bishop Michael Allred, Cowley 1st Ward.