A WORD FOR TODAY, June 11, 2024
Peggy Hoppes
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Blessings. Peg
A WORD FOR TODAY, June 11, 2024
“My heart was hot within me. While I meditated, the fire burned. I spoke with my tongue: ‘Yahweh, show me my end, what is the measure of my days. Let me know how frail I am. Behold, you have made my days hand widths. My lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely every man stands as a breath.’ Selah. ‘Surely every man walks like a shadow. Surely they busy themselves in vain. He heaps up, and doesn’t know who shall gather. Now, Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you.’” Psalm 39:3-7, WEB
I love to take road trips. We are planning a couple this year. The first is to Indiana to visit our daughter in a couple of weeks. Then we are going to visit Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons in October. Many people would rather travel faster by airplane; it does take longer to get to your destination, but sometimes the best times are had during the journey. This was certainly true when we visited Route 66 last summer.
Even when you travel by car, there are times when you can speed past the scenery. We went National Park hopping a few years ago, the end of our journey was in Utah. We drove through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to get there. Texas is huge and we live in the middle of the state. Interstate Highway 10 is more than 880 miles through Texas from the New Mexico border to Louisiana and it runs right through our city. We began our trip at mile marker 556 (marker 1 is at the border of New Mexico), and it took us nearly nine hours just to get out of Texas!
The trip to Indiana will be a little different, but the vastness of Texas is just as evident. The trip is about 1200 miles. It will take us more than 7 hours to just get to Arkansas. More than one third of the trip will be in Texas, the other two thirds will take us through four other states. We won’t stop much along our way, though there are plenty of fun things we could do.
Speed limits in Texas are often 70 or even 80 miles an hour, though slightly slower through the cities. You might think that we’d miss something as we were driving so fast on the road, but not really. Some roads, especially in the west, are very flat, and you can see for many miles. It can take hours to come to a mountain that appears on the horizon. Storms seem to be in the path, but they dissipate long before you reach them. Some trips, like those through west Texas, are miles and miles of flat, beautiful but barren, land. We try to take our rest stops at fun places but with the higher speed limits, we can get so much farther between stops. Even if we don’t stop, there’s always something to see along the way. We’ve made the trip to the north and east several times, and there are landmarks we look forward to seeing each time.
It is good that we can travel fast on the highways, but you don’t want to go so fast when you are visiting places like National Parks and cities. You can’t, quite frankly. In the parks, the roads are too narrow with twists and hills which make it impossible to see ahead. It is similar in the cities, but it is buildings and traffic that block the view. Speed limits are set according to the nature of the road. Twisty roads are slow especially when they don’t have guardrails and cliffs. City streets have obstacles like lights and cross traffic. It is also good to go slow anyway, so you can see whatever there is to see. You never know when there might be something worth stopping to visit.
There is never enough time to do everything. We finish every road trip wishing that we could have stopped more often, wandering on longer hikes, seeing other museums, or eating at one more diner. We are trying to plan our trips so we can have as much fun as possible, although we also like to be spontaneous. We have to be careful, though, because there are always other travelers who are not interested in seeing the sights. They just want to rush through life; they want to go fast because they are more interested in the destination than the journey. Even in the National Parks we were rushed by people who just wanted to get from one landmark to another without stopping to see the beauty in between.
Isn't that the way it is with our lives, though? We have so much to accomplish that we speed around the day without paying much attention to the world around us. I suppose sometimes, like the flat, beautiful but barren land of West Texas, there isn’t much to see. But our lives are not a road trip or vacation; we have a lifetime to glorify God. The problem is that we sometimes rush to accomplish all the wrong things, chasing after vain glories while missing the grace of God.
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