Life's Road Signs

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If you pray stop worrying

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If you pray stop worrying
If you pray stop worrying

This sign is really about faith. If you pray and believe, then you cannot continue to worry about the thing you prayed for. Praying and believing does not mean expecting God to do everything. Here is a great story that illustrates this point:

A man was trapped in his house during a flood. He began praying to God to rescue him. He had a vision in his head of God’s hand reaching down from heaven and lifting him to safety.

The water started to rise in his house. His neighbor urged him to leave and offered him a ride to safety. The man yelled back, “I am waiting for God to save me”. The neighbor drove off in his pick-up truck.

The man continued to pray and hold on to his vision. As the water began rising in his house, he had to climb up to the roof.

A boat came by with some people heading for safe ground. They yelled at the man to grab a rope they were ready to throw and take him to safety.  He told them that he was waiting for God to save him. They shook their heads and moved on.

The man continued to pray, believing with all his heart that he would be saved by God. The flood waters continued to rise. A helicopter flew by and a voice came over a loudspeaker offering to lower a ladder and take him off the roof.  The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he was waiting for God to save him. The helicopter left.

The flooding water came over the roof and caught him up and swept him away. He drowned.

When he reached heaven and asked, “God, Why did you not save me? I believed in you with all my heart. Why did you let me drown?”

God replied, “I sent you a pick-up truck, a boat and a helicopter and you refused it all. What else could I possibly do for you?!”

Waiting on a sign

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You’ve been waiting for a sign. Maybe this is it.

We wait for signs because we want certainty before we act. We want confirmation that the path is right, that the timing is good, that the risk is worth it. And signs can come — in the form of a conversation at the right moment, a book that opens to exactly the right page, an opportunity that appears after a long drought. Signs are real, and paying attention to them is wisdom.

But waiting for a sign can also become a way of avoiding the decision you already know you need to make. You know what the sign would say — you know what you need to do. You’re just hoping for external permission to do what you already feel called toward, because acting without certainty is frightening.

Consider this: action itself often produces the sign you’re waiting for. You take the step and doors open, or close definitively, or redirect you somewhere better. Clarity often comes through doing rather than through waiting.

What are you waiting on a sign about? Is there something you already know in your gut — a change that needs to happen, a conversation that needs to occur, a dream that needs your active investment rather than just your wishful attention?

Sometimes the sign you’re looking for is the persistent feeling inside you that won’t go away. The recurring thought. The quiet knowing that something needs to change. You’ve been waiting on a sign. Consider yourself signposted. Now go.

Do it now – don’t wait

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Do it now. Don’t wait. The sign doesn’t say do it when the timing is perfect, do it when you’re ready, do it when the kids are older, do it when the money is there. It says: do it now.

There is an enormous cost to waiting that most people never calculate. Every day you wait to start the business, write the book, repair the relationship, change the habit, pursue the goal — is a day of progress lost. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. And then one day you’re looking back at a decade wondering what happened to the thing you were going to do.

The perfect moment does not exist. The conditions will never be completely right. There will always be a reason to wait just a little longer — and if you follow those reasons, you will wait forever. The people who do things are not the people who waited for the right time. They’re the people who decided that any time they act is the right time.

Urgency is not panic. It’s clarity. It’s the honest recognition that time is finite, that tomorrow is not guaranteed, and that the life you want to live requires action today — imperfect, incomplete, uncertain action that you do anyway because waiting costs too much.

What have you been putting off? What have you been meaning to do, intending to start, planning to pursue? Do it now. Not tomorrow. Not when things settle down. Now. The road is open.