The Traffic Jam in Atoka

#118

Friend,

About 16 years ago, our family traveled from Tulsa to Dallas for our annual Thanksgiving trek to the Cowboys game. There are no interstates connecting Tulsa and Dallas directly, so you drive to the side of or through various small towns in Oklahoma (Glenpool, Henyretta, McAlester, and Stringtown to name a few).

In some of those places, you’d slow down from 65 to 55 to 45 to 35 in about a mile span, and then within another mile or two, you speed back up. We were about to enter another small town, Atoka, population 3000, (Now home to Reba’s Place). We slowed down from 65 to 55 to 45 to 35 to 25 to 15 to 5 to 0.

Atoka was experiencing a massive traffic jam. Atoka is (generously) 2 miles along, and so I’m guessing we averaged 3 m.p.h. to get through Atoka 45 minutes later. We finally made it through Atoka, and the rest of our drive went smoothly. Honestly, Dallas traffic had nothing on Atoka that year. (We never saw a wreck or anything obvious to explain the traffic jam.)

Every Thanksgiving that we head south to Texas I think about the traffic jam in Atoka, and this year as I was thinking about it, I had a new thought,

Often in life, we know where we are going to, but we don’t know what we will be going through.

• You know you are going to college, but you don’t know who you will meet while you are there.

• You know you are getting married, but you don’t know what this marriage will be like.

• You know you are becoming a grandparent, but you don’t know the challenges and opportunities that will arise.

Life is a lot like that trip to Dallas. In some places, we just fly on by or slow down and take in the scenery. In other places, we are completely surprised by an unexpected traffic jam in the strangest of all places causing us to rethink or reimagine our next step.

We made it through Atoka, and I know you will make it through your Atoka as well. It may be painfully slow and surprising. And like our traffic jam journey, you may never actually learn why it was so backed up. All we could do was keep moving forward at 3 m.p.h. which happens to be the average speed of a person walking.

And you can too. Just keep walking.

Love,

Aaron