Photo by Seth Lemmons

By Melanie Mar Chow

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.
–Proverbs 3:5-6 (NIV)

As a long-time advocate for disciple-making, mentoring and following Jesus, I have been thinking a lot recently about how we grow and find God’s guidance to navigate the challenges of life.  The writer of I John spends a lot of ink and paper to remind us the importance of what it means to be God’s children.  The bottom line is that as God’s children, our paths should direct us to God’s ways of life — but do they?

My experience as a parent makes me think of the paths of life that are not always straight.  Bill Keane, comic strip artist of the Family Circus often depicted how a child’s paths are full of distractions.  The artist often drew panel photos that demonstrated the parents asking their oldest child to go get something and the strip highlighted the many paths of the child on the way to completing the task (or not).

During the fall months, I find myself trying to combat the traffic created by the surge of cars from the many colleges and universities around my home.   There are no straight paths to anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area that does not involve planning and observing traffic patterns. But the beauty is that if you enlist the services of others, including Waze or Google Maps, I’ve learned that I have at minimum four or five different paths to get to my office.  Thanks to these new routes, through hills, side streets and more, I have found some beautiful, picturesque views of Los Angeles early in the morning. I’ve also found that traversing 25 mph zones for schools, though not exactly straightshot paths, does cut on time to get to my desired destination.

Rainy days in LA are the worst.  One day, before I left my home, the traffic report said to expect delays of up to an hour on my normal route.  So I prayed and asked God to help me get to my office in time for my 9 am conference call.  I was told on my mapping system to go east, though my desired direction was to go west. It would have been my nature to ignore the instructions, but I followed the mapping system anyways, and noted that most of the path did not have any traffic at all.  Not only did my drive take me east, it then took me south of my direction and then back north but got me to work in half the time it would have taken me on the normal route.

In the same way, God gets our attention and takes us on different detours of life to teach lessons that we do not expect when we follow His ways.  Sometimes in studying Bible passages, the ways of God are very different than the ways of our human nature.  It may take time to acclimate to God’s provisions and direction, but when we see God’s outcomes, we often cannot help but give Him praise.  In Isaiah 55, God directly reminds us that His ways are NOT our ways.  If we respond to the call to follow Him, our life outcomes may be different than what we expected or sometimes desired.  It may not be popular to learn God’s lessons, but better to learn and go straight with God than to go on the paths that we’ve chosen for ourselves.  Our desire should be to be confident in knowing that our lives are not our own and that it is not for us to direct our steps, but God alone.