To Travel Hopefully

There’s so much about a road trip that mimics real life, and yet I, for one, am slow to apply the lessons of one to the other.

Arizona is an enormous state (sixth in line after Alaska, Texas, California, Montana and New Mexico), so getting from one place to another here takes a while. Driving from where I live in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa to my mother’s cabin outside Prescott, for instance, is a two-and-a-half-hour commitment, yet my family takes it in stride and thinks nothing of it. Buckle the seatbelts and go, and just chill until you’re there. Even my kids get this, and are generally (and atypically) patient about the process.

Why, then, is patience so hard in other realms of life? The same guy who can sit motionless for a numb-butted six-hour drive to San Diego can look at the clock on a dreary workday afternoon and nearly come unglued that it’s only 3:00. Or put that guy in a situation where he’s waiting for a bad thing to go away—or a good thing to arrive—and he wants to scream.

I think the main difference between “road trip patience” and “life patience” is the distinct lack of visible progress that’s so common to the latter. What with in-car GPS telling you where you are, scenery whizzing by and regular Interstate signs assuring you of the dwindling number of miles to your destination, you know precisely when that fidgety are-we-there-yet part of your brain will get some relief.

Real life calls for a different sort of endurance.

God appears to understand that “life patience” does not come naturally. Why else would there be a Bible verse that says, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer?” Everything about that sentence feels like a ticking clock—a slowly ticking clock on which the hour hand is on knock-out drops. Google “Bible verses on patience” and see what you find. That verse is by no means alone. Evidently—and bluntly—this is something we humans appear to suck at.

And yet, when I look back over every life situation that’s required endurance, I see that all of them—100 percent—came to an end. Just like a road trip. I set out, I drove . . . I got there.

Apparently, then, the only unendurable life situation is . . . whichever one we’re in right now. And only because we can’t clearly see the end from here. But again, looking back at other equally unendurable situations, I recognize that I was never without road signs. I was never without something (or someone) that let me know I was, in fact, getting somewhere.

It’s curious that some of the most fun memories of childhood road trips weren’t the destinations, but the traveling—playing “I Spy” or “Slug Bug” with my sisters, reading as my Dad took us cross-country hauling a travel trailer, or just seeing new and different things pass by. Getting where we were going? That was a given with Dad at the wheel, so I relaxed and enjoyed the trip.

Would I go so far as Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive?” No. Arriving is good. But so is the journey. Waiting isn’t wasted time. Joy, patience, faith—they let the miles roll by easily.