The Shoulder of the 101

Traffic on the 101 was moving exactly as badly as I expected.

Anyone who has driven between Ventura, where I Iived, and the San Fernando Valley at rush hour understands the routine. You accelerate for a few seconds, brake for thirty, and repeat the cycle for miles. By the time the car reaches the top of the Conejo Grade, the sun is rising, positioned perfectly to shine through the narrow gaps between the car’s visors. No matter how you adjust them, the light finds you. And the return home is exactly the same.

That afternoon was no different.

In my late 30s, I had finished a normal day of consulting work—sales strategies, marketing positioning, conversations with clients trying to grow their businesses—and I was headed home. My world at the time was a mix of ideas and ambitions. I liked solving problems for companies. I liked the challenge of figuring out what made people respond to a message. It was good work.

But the commute was relentless.

So I drove. Stopped. Rolled forward. Stopped again. The setting sun cut through the windshield like a spotlight. My offramp was still a mile away, and the only thing on my mind was getting home to my family.

That was the plan.

Then God interrupted it.

It didn’t happen the way people expect when they hear a story like this. There was no audible voice. No dramatic vision. The traffic kept creeping forward exactly as before. But the message arrived with a clarity that made it unmistakable, compassionate but insistent, impossible to ignore:

“You can’t do everything you want to do. Choose what matters most and abandon anything that doesn’t get you there.”

The words landed with unusual force. An explosion. An epiphany.

Not because the words were unfamiliar. In fact, the opposite was true. I had already known the principle. I had even used versions of it when counseling other people about their priorities. It was a perfectly reasonable piece of advice. Obvious, even.

Until it was aimed at me. The sentence repeated itself internally with inescapable resolve.

Choose what matters most.
Abandon anything that doesn’t get you there.

I gripped the steering wheel and stared at the cars ahead of me. The traffic rolled forward another few feet. What I realized in that moment was uncomfortable. My life was full. Not in the peaceful sense people mean when they say a life is full, but in the crowded sense. My curiosity ran in too many directions at once. I was interested in everything. I had no time for boredom. Literally no time. If something looked fascinating, I wanted to learn it. If something seemed difficult, I wanted to master it.

My to-do list had become a permanent condition.

I was already a multi-instrumentalist, but the banjo and mandolin were next on the list. A year earlier I had bought graphic design software—back when it still arrived on floppy disks—and the unopened box was still sitting in my home office waiting for the day I would have time to install it.

I played handball competitively and was determined to win a local championship.

Watching sports filled much of the rest of the available space. A habit inherited from years of watching games with my sports-fanatic father.

None of it felt excessive while I was doing it. But in that moment, sitting in traffic a mile from my exit, I saw the pattern clearly.

I was a dog chasing squirrels. The squirrels fascinated me. I loved the pursuit. But there was always another one darting across the yard. Excellence, improvement, mastery. Those goals kept moving just far enough ahead to keep me running. And suddenly I understood what the interruption meant.

Choose what matters most.
Abandon anything that doesn’t get you there.

The realization arrived all at once. Not every pursuit deserves a place in a human life. I felt the weight of that sentence settle in. Something inside me broke open with it. The recognition was so overwhelming that I had to pull the car onto the shoulder of the highway. The traffic continued flowing past me.

And I cried.

Not polite tears. But the kind of sobbing that interrupts breathing and forces you to grip the steering wheel until the wave passes. Because I knew what had just happened. God had taken a truth I had kept safely in the realm of theory and forced it into practice.

If the message was real—and I knew it was—then a decision had already been made. My life could not continue in its current direction. Something had to change. Or more accurately, many things had to end.

The message itself had been simple. But its implications were not.

Over the following days and weeks I began examining my life with an uncomfortable level of honesty. The activities themselves were not sinful. Learning instruments, mastering software, winning competitions, watching games. None of those were intrinsically wrong. But at that moment in my life they were obstacles. They were fragments of attention scattered across dozens of pursuits, each interesting in isolation but collectively preventing something deeper from happening.

Because the more I reflected on that moment on the 101, the more another realization emerged behind it.

Excellence had unobtrusively become my organizing principle.

Not competition with others—that was never the motivation—but competition with myself. The desire to improve, to master, to reach higher standards. It felt admirable. Even virtuous. But it had become the center.

And Jesus was making something else clear. Excellence is not the goal. He is.

True human excellence, when it appears, is merely a byproduct of knowingly or unknowingly pursuing the character and purposes of God. The distance between Creator and creation is too vast for any other conclusion. The closer I drew to him, the more obvious that distance became. And strangely, that realization was liberating. Because it reframed the entire question of significance.

My life did not need to become impressive.
It needed to become aligned.

Jesus told his disciples what ultimately matters: loving him by loving others. Drawing near to God and lovingly helping others do the same. Everything else—every talent, every interest, every opportunity—had to be evaluated by that standard. If something helped accomplish that purpose, it belonged. If it distracted from it, it had to go.

The realignment began immediately. While I still don’t play banjo, many years later I joined a beginners Irish music group to learn mandolin as an excuse to be a witness to fellow musicians of the love of Christ. As for the software, I really did need to use it for graphic design, so I made time when I quit watching sports, allowing only for occasional times when it was the intended purpose of a social gathering. And handball transitioned from a pursuit of mastery to one of several outlets for healthy exercise and comradery.

But the biggest benefit was the increased time this gave me to continue pursuing my passion for studying the Scriptures and passing on all that I’ve discovered about the true source of meaning. Jesus is what matters most and everything we do must serve that end. Our significance is not primarily in what we do but in who we become. And our path in life is to become who we already are—God’s beloved and blood-bought children created in his image for his glory and our good.

The shoulder of the 101 became the place where that reordering began.

Traffic eventually forced me back onto the road. My exit arrived a few minutes later. I drove the rest of the way home in deep thought, still absorbing what had happened. The commute I had dreaded for years had finally justified its existence.

And the proverb had turned out to be right after all. Sometimes the journey does matter more than the destination.

Especially when the destination is the rest of your life.