Where I live, distance is measured in time, not miles.
It takes ten minutes for me to drive from my home to the school, ten miles away. Whereas, the same distance in a city takes much longer.
I know this because while visiting a city, I plugged in the address of my destination and the GPS showed 8 miles. “Yay!” I thought. I’ll be there in less than 10 minutes.
Ha! Thirty-five minutes later, I arrived!
Instead of the uninterrupted rural roads with little traffic that I was used to, I faced traffic lights, road construction, pedestrians, and rush hour traffic. In this situation, ten miles did not equal ten minutes.
My progress forward was interrupted and slowed down.
Is this not similar to our journey through life?
Do we assume that progress means, uninterrupted and speedy movement forward?
When we travel smoothly with little or no interference life seems easy and good.
Those are the times it takes only ten minutes to travel ten miles.
Other times life is full and can be overwhelming. We may feel as if we are speeding somewhere, out of control, rushing around, but not towards our goal. Sometimes people may need our individual attention and progress towards our goal seems to slow down and be far distant. So much seems to interrupt our forward momentum.
These are the “it takes 35 minutes to travel less than ten miles” times in our lives.
At these times, it is easy to believe we are not making any progress. We stop and we go. We go sideways for a while, trying to get around certain challenges. We may feel cheated or disappointed that we have not yet arrived at our planned destination.
Similar to how I discovered the need to allow more or less driving time depending on the different situation, I’ve had to learn to adjust my understanding of true progress.
Our personal growth cannot be measured linearly.
Growth does not mean no heartaches, pain or struggle. Often times, those experiences, which we’d prefer to avoid, might be exactly what provide some of the richest growth of all!
Just like driving across town, areas of our life are under construction. People cross our path along the way that we’re meant to come to know. Stops and delays are part of our journey.
We discover patience and relief when we let go of anger at the delays and learn to trust that we will get where we need to be, just on a different schedule than we first expected.
So what we think of as interference and delay might be the exact path we were meant to travel.
With love,
