The Crosswalk Button I Pressed Four More Times Even Though It Was Already Lit

The Crosswalk Button I Pressed Four More Times Even Though It Was Already Lit

RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 21, 2026

There is a crosswalk two blocks from my apartment where the little white walking man lights up the second you press the button, no delay at all, and I know that because I have stood there enough mornings to have the timing memorized. Tuesday I pressed it once, saw the light come on, and pressed it three more times anyway, jabbing my thumb into a button that had already done its job, as if enough pressure from me could make the cars stop any sooner than the signal already had them stopped. A woman waiting next to me glanced over, probably wondering why a grown man needed to assault a crosswalk button that had clearly already worked. I did not have a good answer for her. I still do not have a good answer for myself.

I have been praying for almost three years now that my nephew would walk through the door of a recovery program and actually stay, not just show up for intake and vanish again the way he has twice before. Some weeks I check the waitlist email from the facility he finally agreed to try so many times a day that I could recite the subject line from memory, same as that walk signal, as if refreshing an inbox one more time might make the bed open up faster than it is going to open up. I am fourteen years sober myself, long enough to know better, and I still stand at that particular crosswalk of the heart jabbing the button over and over, convinced that my checking is somehow part of what makes the light change.

Impatience likes to dress itself up as diligence, as though a man who keeps checking must simply care more than the man who doesn't. I have come to believe it is something closer to the opposite. The light was already working before I touched it the second time. My pressing added nothing to the mechanism. It only revealed how little I actually trusted that the thing I could not see was still true the moment I stopped watching it.

Scripture does not scold a man for the ache of waiting, but it is honest about where the ache ought to be aimed. David wrote it almost like an order given twice because once would not be enough to make it stick. "Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the Lord!" (Psalm 27:14, NKJV). He did not say wait on the outcome. He said wait on the Lord, which is a different object entirely, one that does not require me to keep pressing a button to know He is still there. Micah, writing from a city that had every reason to stop hoping for anything, landed somewhere similar. "Therefore I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me" (Micah 7:7, NKJV). He will hear me. Not He will hear me faster if I ask nine more times before lunch.

Habakkuk is the one who finally put words to the exact shape of my own impatience. He had already gotten his answer from God about the coming judgment, and the answer was simply to wait, which is a harder word to receive than most people admit. "For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry" (Habakkuk 2:3, NKJV). Tarries and will not tarry in the very same verse, which used to read like a contradiction to me and now reads like mercy. It is allowed to feel slow to me and still be exactly on time to Him.

Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten my nephew into that bed any faster. I can tell myself accurately that the facility has a real process, that beds open on their own schedule, that checking the inbox eleven times does not move anyone up the list. Every sentence is true, and none of it has stopped my thumb from finding that inbox one more time before bed, because impatience was never actually a facts problem waiting on a better argument. Peter names the one piece of this I keep forgetting on purpose, that the apparent delay is not God being slow at all. "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9, NKJV). Longsuffering toward us. The very delay I keep fighting might be mercy running on a clock wider than mine, holding a door open longer than I would have held it myself.

This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that fourteen years of white-knuckled checking never could produce on its own. Jesus did not tell His disciples to work harder at staying connected to Him. He told them to simply stay. "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5, NKJV). A branch does not press a button to make the sap move faster. It just stays attached, and the fruit comes on a timetable it was never asked to manage. The psalmist describes the exact posture I am still learning at that crosswalk and that inbox both. "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I do hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, yes, more than those who watch for the morning" (Psalm 130:5-6, NKJV). More than those who watch for the morning is not a man refreshing his phone. It is a man who has stopped needing the sunrise to prove itself early.

I crossed the street Tuesday once the light actually changed, same as it always does, same as it always would have whether I pressed that button once or forty times. God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which inbox you keep refreshing, which bed or job or reconciliation you are certain would move faster if you just checked one more time. He has a plan for the person you are waiting on that was never contingent on your checking, and He will never leave either of you standing at that crosswalk alone.

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Scriptures used (NKJV): Psalm 27:14; Micah 7:7; Habakkuk 2:3; 2 Peter 3:9; John 15:4-5; Psalm 130:5-6.