Following God's Direction

 

Scripture

Proverbs 20:24

 ²⁴ All our steps are ordered by the Lord;
    how then can we understand our own ways?  (NRSVUE)

 Proverbs 3:5-8

⁵ Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
    and do not rely on your own insight.
⁶ In all your ways acknowledge him,
    and he will make straight your paths.
⁷ Do not be wise in your own eyes;
    fear the Lord and turn away from evil.
⁸ It will be a healing for your flesh
    and a refreshment for your body.  (NRSVUE)

Devotion

Road work season is definitely upon us.  This morning, I  got to the final stoplight on my way to work, only to be confronted by a confusing arrangement of traffic cones.  From the perspective of  someone trying to turn left, it wasn't clear where I was supposed to go or whether the road beside my church was even open.  The more I tried to quickly reason out what I was seeing in the moment, the more confused I became.  I decided my best option was to drive straight through the intersection and approach the building from another way.  That decision that led to me weaving a circuitous (and often counterintuitive path) as I came upon closed lanes, traffic cones, construction crews, and detour signs.  

It wasn't the only person who was confused about what the constructions crews wanted drivers to do. Multiple people I saw today mentioned how they had struggled to figure out what was going on, whether roads were open, and how they could quickly get where they needed to be. We knew that there had to have been plan in place when the construction crew put the cones down, but we couldn't quickly figure out how to read it. And after we made our first split-second decisions, each subsequent thing we tried seemed made our pathways worse and more convoluted than ever.   This couldn't have been the people in charge expected us to do.

The clarity that comes with hindsight is a humbling thing.  When I finally parked outside the church, and looked back at that
intersection from the other direction, I could the cones marked the edges of a brief lane change for vehicles to follow.  Then, it gently guided them back into the regular traffic pattern.

Suddenly, everything made sense.  The pathway the road crew put together wasn't the  problem.  The real issues was that problem was my fellow driver's and my sideways perspective on it coupled with our sense of rush.  If we had just paused after pulling slightly out into the intersection, everything would have made perfect sense.

There are times when God's directions seem just as confusing to our human minds as the construction workers' plans were to folks in my community.  Scripture assure that God has a good pathway laid out for each of us.  God even gives us signs on how to follow that path through through things like scripture, study, prayer, and the advice of others.  Still, we can find all those signs too confusing or too time consuming to "read"  This is especially true when we feel surprised, pressured, or rushed.  And so, rather then take the time to pause and ask Holy Spirit to help us make sense of God's directions, we make quick decisions based on our own insights.  Those decisions seem logical, but they usually turn out to be mistakes.  They lead us in convoluted directions, forcing us to make twists, turns, and detours until we finally find our way back to path God had laid out for us.  

What would happen, though, if we stopped relying on human logic in order to make quick, decisions?  What if we paused long enough to try to change our perspective on things by asking the Spirit to help us "read" God's instructions more carefully?  I bet that if we took time out and then put our trust more in God than in our own often-hastily made decisions, we would discover that Christ has a straighter, smoother, and easier way in mind for us then the circuitous ones we will otherwise take.  

Make no mistake: God is always going to get us to where we need to be.  My point is that if we could train ourselves to pause long enough to give the Spirit a chance to speak and then trust God enough to let our steps be ordered by him, then our journey through life would be a lot easier.  And when we do better at discerning and following the path God has in mind for us instead of the one our own wisdom suggests, we will discover that we have a lot fewer moments when we look back and sigh about how we made everything so much more complicated than it needed it to be.

The next time life throws a wrench in your plans and you feel pressured to make a quick decision, I invite you to pause for a moment.  Take a deep breathe, and ask God what to do next.  What the Spirit tells you may seem counter-intuitive or confusing at first, but it will be the right way to go.  And when you have made it through to the other side, you will see just how much simpler it was to follow God's directions then to try anything you would have come up with on your own.  

Prayer

God, thank you for always being ready to guide me along your way.  May your Spirit help me pay attention to your directions and trust in your wisdom instead of trying to make it on my own.  Amen.