When You Just Need To Turn Your Life Around

I am all alone.  It’s a miracle. You too would “get it”, if you had four kids and a husbands whose lives never stop.

Church calls me, and I cannot stay calm…inside four walls, with Jesus fading.  The corporate body, like a current in me, calling me to come and praise Him.

“Still” seeps in the thoughts of God, in the songs absorbing deep in my soul.  Church is finished, so I take the wheel and head back home.  Hoping to fill, those that wait me…

Because Jesus wasn’t meant for walls, and meeting, and hiding in some church building.  His goodness was made for spreading, and pouring out, igniting a world awaiting Him.  For any true God, who chooses to reveal himself through His resurrection…There is no containing…

I drive up the hill and from the right of my eye, I feel an urging to take the longer, sight-seeing journey to where fields praise Him, clouds float in the heavens.  On a road not unfamiliar to my loud, bellowing praises from this heart refusing to stay silent.

It’s a windy route, the scenic route, but a drive finding beauty in the journey….as much as the destination.

I look at the clock.  Time presses.  Baby wakes soon.  And I can’t foresee using an extra three minutes to take the scenic route…when life waits for no one.

I stay on the straight and narrow.  For doesn’t “life” tell us….the world often trying to convince us…The greatest things in life are found by “staying on the road”, following the crowd to safe predictability?

I bend towards the seventy mile, multi-lane freeway, already feeling a hollowing from the dark paved streets and all the metal traps racing to no where.  I can almost feel the residue of heaven fading from my soul, for instead of gazing at His beauty….my eyes start spacing and this well-known freeway drive quickly turns my soul to “auto-pilot”.

Following the crowd never stirs creativity. Finding yourself gridlocked in other people’s thoughtless driving, never draws the God of the Universe in a way abandoned praise, and selfless prayers, down windy roads rejuvenates the soul can.

My mind drifts to the weaving, winding road that often gifts me with cows, birds, and sometimes deer.  I miss the bellowing clouds drawing my eyes to heaven, and the old houses along there, that stir dreams inside me…of a deeper life, a richer time…when people didn’t strive so hard….or live using “hurried” as badges equating to “importance”.

Then slowly, the traps slow even more in their lanes.  For people following aimlessly…always come to a “halt”, in time, eventually….don’t they?  

I slow to a creeping. And the vehicles I’m following lead to an even slower stilling. Until I’m locked between cars and I just want to exit from this madness.

Like in real life?  Maybe.

Lanes lead to a dead stop.  And the cement drowns me in thoughts of, “why didn’t I obey that still small voice?”  If I did, right now I would be singing praises to open skies instead of cursing the cars around me, trapping me in traffic that isn’t moving.  Here where there is nothing to look at, but angry people, and man-made vehicles that never exuberant praise and worship…At least from my mouth.

Then, I see an out.  Over four lanes, a road leading out and down.  I squeeze in….because desperate people do desperate things.  And because living in Seattle has taught me you must fight for things…things you are in need of…

Even if it means escaping the straight and narrow thinking of a world going nowhere.

I make the exit, barely.  Now going, who-knows-where.  Still, thrilled for escaping this sufficating traffic.

I think now about how I wasted so much time in the following.  How disobedience, even to that small voice often leads us to our deficit, slowing us further from the places God wants to take us…even if that road is windy, and the journey is timely or makes no sense at all…

Down and away I keep driving from those metal contraptios jammed on the freeway.  Taking in the trees.  Thankful for the farmlands I pass…on this road still going to nowhere.

But then, I find it.  Was it happenstance?  Was it chance?  The road I detour on drops straight into the very same valley road God whispered for me to take, in the first place.

I can hardly believe it.  My journey of disobedience, the detour I took due to “logic” and from a place of my worrisome “need to’s”….took me back to the same open road God had called me on originally.

And I wonder if it’s true…

• When you are a Christian…all roads really do lead home. 
• Any detour really will direct you to the very same path God had for you in the first place.  
• That even disobedience never truly ever can…pull you away from the call of God. 
• And in His Still Small Voice…there is always a plan…if we are silent enough, humble enough to listen…

Have you taken a detour?  Are you following the crowd?  Has the road you are on only leading you to crowds, and traffic, and all kinds of noise you were not expecting?

Well friends, today I want to encourage you.  It’s not hard.  Grab the wheel, and make the decision to turn your life around. In Christ their is only grace, no ridicule or condemnation.

God always has a plan.  And that plan includes keeping you on the beautiful, glorious journey He originally planned for you.

Will you listen?  Will you follow where He is leading?  Will you fill your life with praise…instead of sticking on “cruise control” and just following an ever con-jested crowd?

Can’t you almost, look to the right….see the open fields, swaying hay dancing in the breeze?  The bright and morning sun, piercing through the puffy clouds?  The road turning and winding while you sit back, feeling the breeze, with the top of your car off?  Breathing it all in…

Because sometimes, life is about the listening to His still, small voice, going where He leads, and absorbing the fullness of His goodness, while praising Him in the journey….

Don’t you think?