When times get tough, blow some bubbles …

Residents of the Dallas/Ft. Worth area complain about how bad the traffic is around here. At times, it can be a challenge getting around the metroplex, but when it comes to traffic, I’ve seen better and worse.

Worse would be trying to get around the San Francisco bay area. Although that city is barely over 800,000 people, it is the most densely populated city after New York City. With all of the commuters coming into the city for business, the population swells to more than a million during the daytime. All that in a city that has more cars than legal parking spaces.

I used to live a 25-30 minute drive from San Francisco, that is, when traffic was especially light. But during rush hour, the same trip would take two hours or more.

The problem with traffic in the bay area isn’t the limited umber of freeways for amount of traffic, but rather, the limited number of surface streets running parallel to the freeways. In many cases, you don’t have the option of exiting a freeway and traveling surface streets to get to your destination. Sometimes you must stay on a freeway, at least to a certain point in your journey, before you can exit and have side streets that can get you to where you want to go.

So when the traffic gets bad and grinds to a halt on the freeways, commuters settle in to inch their way across bridges into the city.

Phoenix, on the other hand has much better traffic even though it’s a much larger city. Phoenix goes back and fourth with Houston for being rated as the fourth largest city in America. Even with a population of more than 4.1 million people, the city is designed on a grid, so when traffic gets heavy on freeways, drivers have multiple options to exit the congestion and take surface roads paralleling the freeways to their final destination.

Now here’s the odd thing: although San Francisco has a greater traffic problem than Phoenix, you’re more likely to experience road rage from other drivers in the Phoenix area than you are in the bay area!

The reason is that drivers in the Valley of the Sun have not had to endure the level of commuting hardships that drivers in the bay area routinely face.

People living in the bay area build in blocks of time for travel. If they live 20 minutes from their job site, they add an hour or two for the commute. It’s not uncommon for bay area drivers to spend four hours or more each day just driving to and from work!

One woman told the story of how she has learned to endure her daily commute in the bay area. She takes a bottle of bubbles with her. When traffic gets bad and grinds to a stop, she rolls down her window and blows bubbles. The woman said she observed other drivers seeing the bubbles rise from the mass of vehicles. At first, others looked at her like she was crazy … then they began to laugh. Instead of sitting there fuming at the guy in front of her, she learned to lighten the mood and share a laugh with others.

She discovered a way to endure her challenge that, in turn, strengthened her character.

Whether driving, or traveling life, we don’t like road blocks, bumps in the road, or things that slow us down. We prefer the wide, smoothly paved freeways at full speed limit. But life, like commutes, doesn’t often work that way.

Life has bumps and things that slow us down, all of which can be used to make us better people. The Apostle Paul tells us how:

“We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love,” Romans 5:3-5.

Why are the drivers in the bay area usually more patient than those prone to road rage in the Phoenix area? They have had to endure more commuter hardships. Likewise, those who face “… problems and trials …” in life have the opportunity to build their character by learning to endure.

When tough times come your way, do you routinely blow your stack? Or have you learned to relax and blow some bubbles?

Scotty