Red Light

Do you remember the last time you sat at a stop light? Do you remember what you were thinking? Were you glad for a moment to check your phone? Did you take a deep breath and chill? Or, were you like me most days—staring at the light, willing it to turn green?

Whenever we are headed somewhere—especially if its good—the last thing we want to run into, is a red light. We are excited, ready to go, anxious to get there—we don’t want to stop. We want to move. Hitting red lights is a pain. Yet the worst ones in life, are the ones we hit when we aren’t even on the road.

It could be that we are on the path to making our dream a reality, when all of a sudden the ground seems to crumble underneath our feet. We could be arriving at the peak of our career and our promotion gets stalled. Or we reach the place where we are ready for marriage, but the ring hasn’t come. Worse, the guy is no where to be found.

Red Light.

When this happens it can feel like those times we get stuck at a traffic light late at night, and it just won’t change. We sit and sit, and begin to wonder if it is broken. After a while we start looking around for other cars or a policeman. We consider running the red light—because, we’ve been sitting there FOREVER. The only problem though, is that when we hit a “red light” in life, it’s not as easy to run.

It’s painful, confusing, and often lonely. Like getting lost in a city we’ve never been in before, we begin to retrace our path trying to figure out if we made a wrong turn. What we want to know is:

How did I get here?

Or, why did I get a red light when everyone else seems to have gotten a green?

Watching others get promoted or married can feel like a grown up version of “red light green light,” and we were the only ones caught. We feel sent back to the beginning while everyone else keeps moving forward. We don’t understand why.

The difficult part is, the reason is usually hard to find. The good news, however, is that these red lights give us time to regroup, to reflect on the direction we are headed, and to really ask ourselves if the path we are on is going to lead us to the things we want most. And, if we are truly brave, we can take this opportunity to reassess our lives to make sure we are becoming the people we want to be.

Red lights in life can feel like the worst things in the world, especially if they last long. But if we accept that we can’t yet move forward in the direction we are headed, and we use this time to our advantage—we may actually look back on this season with gratitude.

The secret to successfully making it through your time at a “red light,” is to embrace it. No, it won’t take the pain or confusion away, but it may very well bring you a better understanding of yourself and others. It may also open your eyes up to something you would have otherwise sped right by if the light had been green.