A New Year, An Old Message

I was driving in heavy traffic in the middle of Chicago on January 1, 2017, when I saw the red.

I had been flying along on the way home from Christmas vacation and the traffic stopped, a sudden flash of red in the sea of traffic swirling below the steel towers.

Why are there red lights on the backs of vehicles when they brake? I asked myself. I instinctively knew the answer: the human eye and brain are not fast enough to instantly detect that a vehicle ahead is slowing down.

Perhaps after the first fast cars were made, there had been an accident because one driver didn’t notice that the driver ahead was stopping.  Maybe someone was killed.  Maybe, the car manufacturers went to the scene and stood amid the splintered Model T’s, their faces quiet, wondering if their brilliant invention would destroy rather than aid humanity.

Perhaps the next day, Henry Ford called a meeting.  I can see him, taking off his hat and setting it on the conference room table, drinking his morning coffee from a china cup while an assistant threw logs into the fireplace.

“What could we add to our cars to warn the cars behind them when they are slowing down?” he asks his team.  “If we continue to develop faster cars, chances are people will become less and less able to notice that the car ahead of them is slowing down.  And the crash will be more violent at faster speeds.”

“What about a flag?” one man said.  “It could be mounted on the roof and activated with a lever when someone plans to stop.”

“But that wouldn’t help in the dark,” said his rival from across the table.

“What about a lamp the driver could turn on?” a quiet man said.

In fact, this is what they started with, I read later.

Then at some point in the century, someone must have said, “Hey!  Is there any way we could just wire the light right to the brake pedal?  That way no one could forget to turn the light on!”

If a person’s eyes were sharp enough to notice when the car in front of them was reducing its speed there would have been no need for brake lights. But they weren’t. They still aren’t. Maybe some people would be safe drivers without brake lights, but most of us need that warning to remind us that danger is close.

And so, the creators of the driving machine came up with a way to redeem one of its painful qualities, implementing a feature now so routine that I think this is the first time in my 34 years of life that I have really thought about it.

And all across the world, around America, throughout the Midwest, in every lane of traffic throughout Chicago, those red lights flash: Warning, warning, watch out, there is still time to be safe, like a message from the brilliant mind who back in the early 1900’s said, “Hey!  I have an idea!”

And I thought, what a testimony to the brilliance of the original Creator, the one who made that particular brilliant man and every person in His image!  How like God to want to make something beautiful!  How like God to look on with sadness when that beautiful creation causes destruction and pain!  How like God to think of a solution to save people from their own inabilities!

God’s solution to the problem of mankind’s self-destruction was also red.  The analogy breaks down, because this red was so costly.  But like the red lights that flashed at me on New Year’s Day, the blood of the cross also flashes around the world, across America, in every place where people have accepted that Jesus Christ was God’s solution to the problem of destruction.  Warning, warning, watch out, there is still time to be saved.  This message from God, from years ago, is just as valid today.

And, like a brake light passing from car to car to car, the message of salvation is passed from person to person.  There are no national regulations forcing people to accept and install the message of Christ, as there are for brake lights. Only other redeemed people, flawed but redeemed by God’s plan, can pass it on.

I left Chicago, circling left up the ramp toward the Skyway, with a sense of awe for the brilliant mind of God, evident even in the middle of a sea of steel.