Paying attention to the road of life

There are lessons to be learned from paying attention to the road.

The other day, I was returning to the office after lunch with the newest member of our administrative team at Chateau Girardeau. My passenger noted a police car parked along Independence with its lights flashing. It was not a traffic stop; there was no one else around. Unusual. As we passed the cruiser, we noticed the officer was on his radio. His gaze was on the street, which had buckled after having been baked by successive 90-degree days. When concrete endures excessive heat for enough time, it expands. When this expansion occurs, there is nowhere for the road to go but up. A small teepee-like anomaly in the roadway was thereby created, a scourge to the suspension of whatever car might unwittingly come upon it.

Everything was fine on this major artery of Cape Girardeau, which runs from the Mississippi River out to its terminus just past Landmark Hospital. Fine, that is, until unrelenting heat forced a reaction. The buckling of the road seems an apt metaphor for people who snap or break under the pressure of too much stress. I sometimes wish our sartorial traditions could allow people to wear sashes over our clothing, warning others about the life events that leave us vulnerable. One sash might read, "Lost a child." Another might declare, "Job in danger." There are dozens of possible messages, all of which could caution passersby to be careful in the things we might say or do. None of us knows how close someone else is to breaking under the heat of stress. Being aware enough to notice when another may be struggling could keep us from uttering provocative words that may buckle someone else's emotional roadway. One of the legendary pastors of the United Methodist tradition in Missouri, the Rev. Ron Watts of LaCroix Church, shared the following statement attributed to Philo of Alexandria in a recent Facebook post: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." Watts' words echo one of the fruits of the Spirit, found in Galatians 5: Kindness.

A current roadway development in my city of residence is on Lexington Avenue at Highway W. A roundabout, sometimes called a rotary or traffic circle, is being constructed there and I'm thrilled to see it. Roundabouts are commonplace in the United Kingdom and have been built more and more in the U.S. since the early 1990s. Roundabouts are already in place near St. Francis Medical Center, near the River Campus, and just outside the business district of Jonesboro, Ill. – site of one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. Roundabouts are proven to reduce the number of accidents, especially often deadly T-bone crashes, and eliminate the need for expensive signalization – e.g., traffic lights. The truth, however, is people find roundabouts confusing. In the movie "European Vacation," the Clark Griswold family entered a rotary in Paris and couldn't figure out how to get out – spending hours going around and around as darkness fell in the City of Light. A roundabout led to one of the very few true arguments in my marriage. My wife and I, suffering jet lag after arriving in the U.K. in 2003, were traveling in Perth, Scotland. I was driving and my wife was navigating. Insistently, my impatience fueled by tiredness, I kept shouting, "Where do I get off?" My wife replied in a stressed tone, betraying her own weariness: "I don't know. I've never been here before, either!"

Roundabouts can teach patience. You have to wait to get in them, yielding the right-of-way to those motorists already inside. Once inside, you have to be patient with your partner, who is trying to discern how to help you emerge and get on the right road. Patience, I point out, is another of the fruits of the Spirit found in Galatians 5.

Yes, there are lessons to be learned in paying attention to the road.

Dr. Jeff Long is executive director of the Chateau Girardeau Foundation, is part-time faculty in religious studies at SEMO, and is a retired United Methodist pastor. He lives with his wife and two teenaged daughters in Cape Girardeau.