Traffic Signs

Have you ever noticed how desperate we tend to be?

Seriously. At our core, when you break everything down to the basics, strip away any pretense of our having any clue at all just how this cosmic clock ticks, and try to wrap your brain around the fact that we just could be on the marble that some giant alien kid is playing with, we get pretty desperate.

Not that I believe in the giant marble, but it just occurred to me today. I had the revelation while fighting the urge to give someone finger in traffic.

I know, I know, that’s not very holy or righteous, but since I have moved to Virginia, I am struck the unapologetic inability of anyone to drive. Seriously, I think this place gives driver’s licenses in exchange for proofs of purchase or something. I was exiting off of the expressway today, when the person exiting in front of me all but stops to let the person in front of him, who had failed to see the exit in time, over. After that near-death experience, I pull into the parking lot of a grocery store to observe that drivers obviously have no clue that the parking lanes with arrows are meant to funnel traffic in one direction. Going opposite that direction causes issues. Except that the people who are driving opposite that direction really don’t get why everyone is staring at them, and why they’re having difficulty squeezing past all the other vehicles. My favorite is when they back out in front of you, and proceed to come back your direction, against the flow of traffic.

That was the genius that almost got finger.

After I repented, I was thinking about the look on her face. It was blank. Almost panicked. This kind of overstimulated, hypervigilant fear that something she couldn’t quite identify could happen. That look stayed with me.

And as I wandered into the grocery store, I was looking at the facial expressions of those around me in the checkout lines. Blank. Reserved. I smiled at a girl (she was hot), and she just blankly stared back at me, and turned around. Complete social anonymity. I don’t know you, I don’t want to know you, just leave me alone.

Let me go home alone to the television to do homework, be too busy to call friends, and secretly cry because something very basic is wrong.

Let me go home to a family that is slowly unraveling, act like the glue that holds it together, and secretly lose sleep because I can’t shake the idea that it’s broken.

Let me go hang out in a coffee shop with “friends” who may or may not be there when it really counts, talking about superfluous things that don’t matter, and secretly wonder when I go to bed tonight why something essential is missing.

Scared. Lost. Wandering. Trying and failing. We’re missing something. Something very basic. Something we can’t make it without. We can exist without it, be we can’t live without it. We can survive in an emotional and intimate vacuum, but we can’t truly have a pulse without it. It’s something that’s outside of us, because if it were inside of us, it would be no bigger than we are, and somewhere deep down, in a place we don’t talk about, that frightens us in a way we can’t describe. It has to be external. It has to be powerful. It has to be good. We desperately cling to and wonder about that.

By definition, the elusive idea that is missing from the hearts resting in turmoil behind the scared faces is God. But somehow, we’re too proud to admit that He could be it. Too knowledgable to recognize that He is that answer. Too intelligent to believe in Someone we can’t see, hear, or touch, even though we can see that, if He were that limited, He wouldn’t be the answer. Somehow, we’ve missed it.

I guess we’re always driving the wrong way, aren’t we?