I don’t commute to work each day, but I’m on the interstate almost as much as the next person. With our dentist, orthodontist, and Kohl’s at the other end of a 17-mile stretch of I-30, this corridor is as crucial to the care and upkeep of my family as hot tea and chocolate are to the care and upkeep of me.

Imagine my excitement when several years ago our state’s highway department announced it would be rebuilding more than 300 miles of our 655-mile interstate system, with nearly 17 miles of that being "my interstate." Crews would be working to transform the very road I and about 63,000 of my neighbors race up and down regularly when we go "into town."

This was to be no paltry pothole-patching party; it would be the grand ball of highway improvement. Plans included expanding the interstate to six lanes, replacing the concrete roadway, reconfiguring nine interchanges, erecting a concrete barrier wall in the median and changing frontage roads from two-way to one-way traffic. Talk about "extreme makeovers"!

From the time the work crew rolled its first orange barrel into place, the road construction has affected our lives in more ways than we ever could have imagined. We leave earlier to get where we need to go because of construction delays. We remap our familiar routes to destinations on the other side of the interstate—which for us includes our church, the home center, and the movie theater—because of the switch to one-way access roads. We run late to jobs, appointments and meetings because of holdups in the work zones. And we have had to extract the lead from our feet in order to please the highway patrol and, more importantly, to prevent accidents.

But I have found a bright side to much of the freeway frustration in the amount of time these construction delays have given me simply to be still. Coming to a halt in bumper-to-bumper traffic serves up miles and miles of much-needed "think time" for someone who claims she never gets enough of the stuff.

While stuck in traffic I have found time to plan dinner menus, choreograph tricky after-school schedules, and decide what to buy my dad for his birthday. I’ve come up with article ideas and ways to pare down my to-do list. But not all my thinking as I inch down the interstate has been quite so down to earth. Things like a beautiful sunset beyond the line of cars in front of me or a close call with the concrete median can propel my musings to much loftier heights. I’ve learned that a person can pick up some heavy duty lessons about life when traveling a road that’s under construction.

For example, I’ve learned that making something better often requires that it be taken apart first. Cracked roadways, eroded shoulders, damaged guard rails…workers can’t simply pour or erect the new over the old; they have to deconstruct before they reconstruct.

Sometimes job stresses can crack up our family’s peace. Caring for a sick loved one can stoop our shoulders with fatigue. Bad news can demolish our dreams. But maybe we should consider the following when those kinds of events steamroll their way into our lives: We just might be "under construction" ourselves. As inconvenient and at times dangerous as these intrusions may be, they just might be paving the way for better things to come. "I know the plans I have for you," He promises us in Jeremiah 29:11, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11).

May we remember that promise with trust and hope as we inch our way past those orange barrels.