I was just on the state transportation website, checking out high traffic periods for the Memorial Day Weekend. Suffice to say, it’ll be bumper to bumper for hours whichever route I choose. That phrase put me in mind of Elizabeth’s sitting-in-traffic poem from Love and Its Interruptions (2015), “From Where I Sit.” In her words,

I wrote “From Where I Sit” in a car, my husband driving us to Boston, probably in the mid-1990s. As the mystery of who God might or might not be is always on my mind, I felt that between a working car and a decent road I’d found a perfect metaphor for what God might have had in mind. Going east to Boston wouldn’t work, but taking the cold, northern route “up” would. And with just as much traffic.

If you read through the poem again or give it a listen, you’ll see the speaker finds herself thinking about that highway to heaven and preferring the incarnate presence beside her. Don’t we all? “Earthly love and earthly flesh” holds more appeal for us earthly creatures, something “God knows” if he knows anything about us, Elizabeth reminds us with a smile.