About a month ago I passed a boy and his dad playing catch in their yard as I was driving through my neighborhood. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ball sail over the boy’s head. The next thing I saw was the ball hitting my windshield. There’s a white mark on the glass still.
Maybe you’ve never managed to collide with a baseball, but there’s a good chance something has hit you out of the clear blue. You were going along and something smashed into you. I’m not talking a bump in the road. I don’t mean a flat tire that you could fix and keep going. I mean something that slammed into you. It left a mark. It sent you in a whole new direction.
You had your eyes on a destination, a beautiful and desirable place. And then God said, “Turn left. Your path is to the left. The way I have planned for you is not the way you envisioned, but it is the best way for you to go because it is what I have planned. Because it is the way I have prepared for you. The provisions I have laid out for you are there, along that path to the left. The other path is not for you. The other path does not have all that I intend for you. It’s not that what you wanted is wrong – it’s just not the way I’m taking you. Turn your eyes to me. Trust me. Go the way that I have directed you.”
The question is, what will you do? Will you turn down the road to the left? It doesn’t look like it even goes any place you want to go. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty dark and scary looking. You might even say that it passes right through the valley of death’s dark shadow. So what will you do?
When the road ahead is closed, it’s usually not a good idea to ignore the signs and keep driving. It may be alright for a while, but eventually, you’ll find out why the barrier was there. We always have the choice to go our own way, but when we are no longer on the path God has laid out for us, we can be sure it will become a path that leads to destruction.
The Bible says that we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). We can live in a way that our choices, and our actions, say we are convinced that what we can’t see is stronger and more real than what we can see. When all we can see is a dark and unexpected veering off, we need to walk by faith – to turn left because we are confident that all God’s promises to love us and care for us are true. That there really is no other way for us to go, no other path for us to follow, because any other path will lead us away from the heart of God.
As for God, His way is perfect. All the Lord’s promises prove true. Psalm 18:30