Close your eyes for a moment and picture one of the busiest roads you know.
Not the one you drive occasionally, but the one you know too well. The road that never keeps you waiting for surprise because traffic is guaranteed. You already hear the horns in your head before you get there. You know where cars slow down, where tempers rise, where movement turns into endurance. Over time, you stop hoping for a smooth drive. You simply prepare yourself to survive it.
Now imagine something strange. You take that same road on an ordinary day, at the same time you always do, and it is completely clear.
No traffic.
No gridlock.
No chaos.
Your first response is not joy. It is alertness.
Your foot eases off the accelerator, not because the road demands it, but because your body does. Your eyes dart from mirror to mirror. Your mind whispers questions it cannot answer. Why is it empty? What is coming next? Where is the delay hiding? Is there a robbery attack? Has rapture happened?
Your heart begins to beat faster, and suddenly you are more tense on an open road than you ever were in traffic.
Nothing is wrong, yet everything in you is preparing for something to go wrong.
This moment reveals more than we realize. Many of us have lived so long inside hardship that our nervous systems no longer recognize peace as safe. Repeated pain trains the mind. It teaches the soul what to expect. After enough disappointments, struggle stops feeling like an interruption and starts feeling like home.
So when ease finally appears, we do not settle into it. We question it. We have been through too many cycles. Prayed too many prayers that seemed unanswered. Trusted people who walked away. Believed for change that came late or not at all. Somewhere along the line, hope became risky, and guardedness felt wiser.
We still believe in God, but we no longer expect Him. That quiet resignation is not humility. It is the residue of trauma. It is also one of the enemy’s most effective deceptions. If Satan cannot stop you from believing in God, he will try to stop you from believing God will show up for you.
So he whispers, Look at your history. Look at the patterns. Stay alert. Do not relax. Help does not come easily. Victory does not last.
Over time, that whisper becomes your inner voice but God is speaking too, and His voice tells a different story.
Those seasons of pain were not evidence that God forgot you. They were not moments when His love ran out. God loved you before the struggle found you. He loved you in the middle of it. He loves you now, even as He begins to heal the way those seasons shaped your expectations.
Some of what you endured was never meant to be permanent. It was not meant to become the lens through which you see life. Survival was a chapter, not the conclusion.
The danger is when we confuse familiarity with truth. When struggle feels normal, we assume it is ordained. When peace feels unfamiliar, we assume it is suspicious.
But God never designed your soul to live on constant alert.
So when the road finally opens, when grace meets you without resistance, when progress comes without the usual fight, God is not testing you. He is restoring you.
The clear road is not a setup.
The calm is not a trick.
The silence is not the pause before disaster.
Sometimes God really has gone ahead of you and made the crooked places straight.
The real work then is not driving faster, but learning to breathe. Learning to trust without scanning the horizon for pain. Learning to receive good without bracing for loss.
Many of us know how to endure traffic. Few of us know how to enjoy the open road.
Yet that is where healing begins.
When you stop measuring God’s faithfulness by how much you have survived, and start recognizing it in the fact that you are still held, still seen, still deeply loved.
God is not asking you to stay tense.
He is inviting you to rest.
And sometimes, believing that peace can be real is the bravest faith you will ever practice.
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