How many times have I thought about my path in life? A thousand, a hundred, a million? When I look back on everywhere I have been, all the things I have done, I don’t see a straight path.
You would think that the path would be straighter. If I follow what God has planned, then the path should be straight, right?
I know, each time I went “off track” there would be a curve taking me where I should not go. Even a hard right or left turn, and who knows how far afield I would go before heading back to the track!
I can look back now at all the wrong turns, I can see where I made mistakes. At times, I would turn myself around and head back to the path; at other times, going back would be more like a bungee cord, reaching the end and being pulled back to the top. Still other times, I could feel something else pulling me back, gently, so that I ended up where I should be without even knowing I had left the path.
But, here’s a thought…. What if the straight and narrow is not God’s path?
Ecclesiates was written by Solomon, one of the wisest men in the Bible. When I read this verse, I realized that maybe the path that I was on when it went crooked, was not the wrong path, as I thought at the time, but it was where God was leading me so that I could learn a lesson, for my own life and for my future life, so that I would be able to understand others and what they were going through, and to help them in their walk through this life.
Maybe God’s path was the winding path, and not the perfectly straight one! I started to think about what we see in everyday life, in nature. The rivers do not flow straight, but they do go where they are meant to go. They follow the terrain, they create beauty as well as water for living creatures. When man tries to change the flow of what God created, sometimes it works, other times, it causes problems, disasters.
So goes my life. If I try to straighten what God has planned for me, and the path He planned is not perfectly straight, then I might miss a lesson that I needed to learn, or I will take myself into an area where I am not supposed to be, and I have to head back to the path.
So, I realized, now looking back, sometimes when the path was not straight, when I could not see the end, that is where I was supposed to be. Not always the easiest way, but God’s way.
I don’t always go His way, but I am trying. And praying that all my family and friends are trying too! And my prayers are for this new year, 2022, be a better one, but what ever happens, remember the path is not always the straight and narrow, but with God there, it is always the right path.
Treasures 3927 