Traffic lights, Stop & Go, Speed Bumps

Grab the Moment #4

Let’s delve right into grabbing the moment today. I find when I’m driving to be a great time to pray, especially when I’m travelling a familiar route. I don’t have to concentrate on navigating as I know exactly where I’m going - at least that is, I know where my car is headed.

Perhaps in life we never exactly know where we’re going. We make plans and we head off in the direction we think we want to go, and sometimes God has other ideas. Sometimes it’s only after we look in the rearview mirror and see where we’ve been, that we understand where we are today.

I’m in a reflective mood currently, reviewing the past and pondering the future. There’s lots of reasons why this is so, and sometimes it’s like that isn’t it, where a few things converge together.

With my Dad’s dementia it’s easier for him to talk about days long ago. He can retell stories from his childhood and teenage years with vibrant accuracy. He visits my Aunty, his sister, once a week and they look at photos together and talk about the old days. Every Thursday for the last year, I’ve dropped him off and picked him up a few hours later, but in recent weeks instead of dropping him off, I’ve stayed there as it’s just a bit much for my Aunty to manage him on her own. I give them their own space and work at the desk in the bedroom and in the background I listen to them both recalling old times. If a stranger listened in to those conversations they’d have no idea that my Dad has dementia and would be even more surprised to know that sometimes he forgets how to form words and speak in sentences.

I’ve also been thinking about the more recent past because of my own health. In a few days it will be 10 years since my dramatic life-saving, life-changing surgery and I’m feeling celebratory. Having gone into the emergency department of the local hospital in the town of Pirna in Germany, thinking I had picked up an extreme tummy bug on our travels, I was surprised to find I needed emergency bowel surgery. The whole experience became a spiritually important event for me. The words of the doctor on duty often play over in my head. I immediately asked if we could fly home to New Zealand, he responded in his broken and blunt english to say, “You do not have that long to live.” A few hours later they wheeled me into surgery and three days after that I woke up to a new world. Even after 10 years I’m still getting used to navigating this new world and I’m slowly facing the fact that maybe I’ll never really get used to what it means for me physically. My specialist says that despite the physical limitations I now live with, I can expect to live a long life. He jokes, “Shortened bowel not shortened lifespan.” Yet it’s more than the changes in my body that have awakened a new world for me. From the moment the doctor spoke those words to me, I felt God’s presence with me in a way that wrapped around me, encasing me in what feels like an almost physcial layer of protection. I still feel that closeness of God to me, a gift and treasure that gets me through my own hard days and has helped me navigate some of the other tough situations I’ve had to deal with in these years since.

Our Lord and our God,
you are my mighty rock,
    my fortress, my protector.

- 2 Samuel 22:2 (CEV)

Last month we went to a 75 year celebration at one of our previous churches. Our youngest two children were born there and they’re now in their late twenties. It’s a long time since we were there and it’s hard to keep up with the people and goings on of past churches as invariably wherever we are currently working is where our attention is taken. There is a tension at these church celebrations in remembering the past, acknowledging and celebrating the present and also looking forward to the future. The people of this church did a beautiful job of holding the balance of all three, connecting the seeds planted in the past, including those planted in our time there, to what is happening in the present, and holding out hope for what is ahead. Their journey hasn’t been straightforward and has had a few Stop and Go times in the last few years, but they’re in a good place currently. It was surprisingly encouraging of our past, and it was lovely to see some old faces and reflect not just on the past, but on the present and what’s yet to come.

And so with all this thinking of past, present and future my thoughts turned to prayers in our Grab the Moment series that capture something of the Stop and Go, the journeying forward, the navigation through life.

I’ve always loved a journey metaphor and I’ve had more than one creative project built around roads or road signs. In this issue of our sensory prayer room we’ll use traffic lights, speed bumps and those temporary stop and go traffic signs. I’ve also added the U-bend prayer from 5 Senses to Prayer - A collection of experiential prayers - Book one.

You might want to create your own prayers when you’re on the road, whether you’re walking, cycling, on public transport or in a car…. keep your eyes open and follow the signs and turn your thoughts into prayers.

May God be with you in your travels wherever the road of life is taking you

On the journey

Caroline

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Traffic Lights Prayer

As you drive through an area with traffic lights, passing through the green, slowing for the orange, and stopping for the red, think about your own life and faith journey. What areas of your life feel like they’re green for go, orange for slow or red for stop? Notice the temporary nature of traffic lights and the way they control the traffic to allow everyone to get a turn at moving forward with the green light. Even though we stop at the red light, it’s a temporary pause. The light doesn’t stay red forever. We can get impatient with the red light, in our hurry to get to a destination or we can use the pause to look around us and observe our surroundings, to take a moment to reset and readjust. Next time you stop at a red light, invite God to be with you in the pause, allowing you to see things that you might not have noticed when you’re in the flow of green for go.

Stop and Go Prayers

When we walk or drive through roadworks we are often faced with detours or signs telling us to slow down. In places where two way traffic has been reduced to single lanes, temporary stop and go signs direct the traffic. These signs are often held by workers, operating manual traffic control. Each worker is equipped with walkie-talkies and protective clothing as they carry out their task in all weathers. With the driver of the car having no visibility of the road ahead and the traffic that might be coming towards them, there is no choice but to put our trust in the hands of the manual traffic controllers. In life we never really know what’s around the corner for us and what the road we’re about to travel on will actually be like for us. We can turn to others for guidance, but even others don’t have the full insight or foresight to really know what is up ahead. This is where our faith and our trust in God helps us. In the stop and go of life, it is to God we can turn for guidance and comfort in the journey. Talk to God in prayer about the journey up ahead of you, including the parts you can anticipate with some certainty and those that are around the corner and out of sight.