“You don’t want God, You want a fairy,” I suggested, while having lunch with a friend the other day.
She was complaining that she was “done with God.” She explained that she had been working on her issues for over six years now, and she wanted to know when it’s supposed to get easier.
I laughed. I know her well enough to know that if I laugh out loud, she won’t hit me. She noticed me laughing and was not impressed.
“What?” she said.
I went on to explain to her the visual the Lord had given me in regard to my walk with Him.
Our walk with God is like traversing the globe. We will go through seasons that will seem like walking in a meadow with birds singing and flowers blooming. Sometimes we will feel like we are walking forever on a seemingly endless blacktop with circumstances flying by that cause us to duck and take cover from relational debris.
Oftentimes we will walk alongside a winding river, enjoying the beauty of the falling leaves. All too often, we will swear we are in a season of dry desert with no refreshing in sight and no one to grant us reprieve. My personal fave is the season of the mountaintop. I once heard someone say, “You have to go through the valleys to know what to scream from the mountaintop!”
Nonetheless, it’s like hiking the globe. We can’t always have the good stuff. Knowing myself, if my walk were always good, I would check God at the curb and keep driving, thinking I had deserved the goodness and somehow my actions have rewarded me rightly. Ha! Endless humanity.
Thank goodness He doesn’t leave us to ourselves. It’s the seasons of dryness and the swamplands that keep us focused on Him. It’s the quiet nights on the highway alone that keep us grounded in the goodness of God. Without the potholes, detours, yielding, merging and so on, we wouldn’t need a God.
Even though we are strutting through the unknown, He always gives us what we need. Take the Florida turnpike, for example. Billboards everywhere offer you “entertainment” (anything from pecan logs to strippers). But have you ever noticed the rest areas and gas exits come at just the right time? Have you noticed that all along that exhausting, straight, two-lane flat land of road there is an emergency phone on the right of way every few miles? There are mile markers and reflective signs everywhere, always reminding you where you are and to prepare you for what is ahead. God is like that. Our problem is we are usually too focused on the reward that we miss our journey.
So, next time God gives you a detour, write it down. Get the message. Understand it, process it, take responsibility for it. Chances are He created or at least allowed it for your best interest. Don’t miss it!