Someone had this inscribed on their tombstone:
Pause dear friend as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now, you soon will be.
Prepare yourself to follow me.
Below it, another person had added the following:
To follow you I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.
I was traveling recently on I-85 south and there were a couple of places where construction was taking place. The sign was pretty clear, Left Lane Ends—1 Mile. Or at least, I thought it was clear. At both places though, the left lane remained full of cars.
Most of them were making no effort to merge into the right lane. Instead, they were speeding ahead in an attempt to pass as many cars as they could before they would ultimately run out of lane and have to depend upon the goodness of someone they had just passed to allow them to merge in. Of course, this had the effect of creating a bottleneck that slowed things down considerably for everybody. I did notice in my rear view mirror that the driver of an eighteen wheeler had taken it upon himself/herself to block the lane and stop all of the left lane foolishness.
Why do people want to stay in the left lane until the very last moment? Is getting six cars ahead really more important than clogging things up for themselves and everyone else? What do they have against the right lane? As I was pondering these things, it occurred to me that maybe this was a spiritual metaphor. In life, it seems that there are some people who just don’t want to live in the right lane. If they have any interest in it at all, it will only be at the last moment when they see the lane they’ve been living in is about to run out. Heaven only becomes of interest when their time on earth is about to end.
That’s sad. And when I think about it, I suppose that those who live in the right lane have perhaps talked too much about going to heaven (as if that’s the be all, end all of what it means to follow Jesus), and not enough about living in such a way as to bring heaven to earth. What I’m saying is that our Father is as concerned about us living in the right lane is as He is with us dying in the right lane. In fact, if you live there you don’t have to worry about merging later on.
Which way are you going? Life is in the right lane.
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 