“Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” Psalms 77:19-20
My wife and I have a couple of different navigation systems on our phones. Deciding on which one to go with has proven to be challenging at times. Sometimes what is supposed to be a shortcut or a better route seems more like a dead end.
However often the frustration that we experience is not the navigation system’s fault, but the fact that we are in a hurry. In addition, we don’t give ourselves enough time to get to where we want to go, and one thing the navigation system can’t do is miracles.
As I write this, my wife is in front of the mirror still, and we are supposed to be somewhere at 4pm. It’s 4pm now. I use to stand in the doorway of the bathroom and stare at her. I gave up doing that. It doesn’t work. We need a miracle. So I redeem the time and write my blog.
God is a God of miracles! But sometimes God’s path to salvation—to where He wants us to be—to His best for our life—to our miracle will not seem as the best route that could have been taken. It may not only sometimes feel like the long way, but the hardest way.
When God walked before his people through the sea, the Psalmist writes that he left no footsteps of himself. Therefore “the ways of God, like the passage through the Red sea, are all full of mercy to his people; but they are also, like that, often unusual, marvellous, inscrutable; and we can no more trace his footsteps than we could have done those of Israel, after the waters had returned to their place again. Let us resolve, therefore, to trust in him at all times; and let us think that we hear Moses saying to us, as he did to the Israelites, when seemingly reduced to the last extremity, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of Jehovah.” — Horne.
Jesus hanging on a cross didn’t seem to the apostles as the right path for Him. So they all fled in fear. But after the resurrection they would all learn that God’s detours, or what seems like it, don’t lead to dead ends.
Sometimes the hard paths are where we learn more about God and ourselves in a way that miraculously changes us from the inside out. The hard paths put us in positions to see God doing in and through our lives what only He can do as we depend on Him.
Furthermore what may seem to us as a wrong turn, no outlet or the long way around, is God’s training ground to prepare us for the much more that He has in store.
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