Street Lights

I spent most of Christmas break in Huntington Beach, California. "Surf City", as they call it, is a seaside city in Orange County in Southern California. According to the 2010 census estimate, the city population was 202,566; making it the largest beach city in Orange County in terms of population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach,_California).

Quite often, I found myself walking along the busy road that is Beach Boulevard. Stores, gas stations, restaurants, corporations, and people lined the road. Cars filled the road with the zoom of their engines, burnt out tires, bad brakes, and honked horns. One of the many components of Beach Boulevard, however, is the street lights which seem to be only a football field's length from each other. As I kept walking through the streets, I came to a very revealing realization.

When you approach a stop light, you have to press the button on the light pole in order to walk across the street. After pressing the button, you have to wait for the walking sign to come up. Apparently, some people do not always follow that rule. After stopping at several lights, I noticed a common trend to just walk across the road if it "seemed" that no cars were coming; regardless of the signal the sign was showing. I had plenty of opportunities to walk across the street, even when the walking sign did not blink. That is when God spoke to me...

Sometimes, roads are not meant to be crossed for a reason. We see an example of this with Adam and Eve when they took the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

There are plenty of roads that one can go on:

The Narrow Road (righteousness)

The Wide Road (sinfulness)

Who to marry

When to marry

Where to live

Where to work

Who to trust

What to do in so many situations

And even though we may believe that the coast is clear, it is essential to our lives and our faith to simply wait on God to give us the signs... and follow those signs regardless of what we see. And there is only one way to truly walk, aware of God's signs, and that is walking in the light.

1 John 1:5-7 says, "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sins."

When we walk in the light, a life not so confused by sin and selfishness, we see clearly and choices become so driven by God instead of ourselves. And walking with God requires patience, productive study of the Bible, appropriate application to one's life from scripture, honesty with God in prayer, and insane openness with God about our lives.

This is Bryce Crowell, signing off...