Dead-End Roads of Our Making

We chart these paths. We set these goals. We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go. There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending. Sometimes that road is well defined and clear. Sometimes there’s very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we’re really on any sort of road at all. And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods. “There’s some sort of road that we’re all walking.”

Whatever kind of road that we’re on, it’s both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends. It’s stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends. It just ends. They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful. It was the path to their dreams. It was the road to a life-long relationship. The highway to fiscal wealth or career advancement. The byway that led them to everything that everyone else said that they could never do or never be…but it doesn’t go to any of those kinds of places at all. It dead-ends. In the middle of nowhere.

A dead-end is likely the product of being on the wrong road. And if I created the road, it’s probably going to dead-end because it’s probably the wrong road. Frequently, the dead-end will be up out of sight from where we started this journey (so that we won’t have second-thoughts taking it). Or, we can actually see the dead-end, but we live in denial of it because we want what we want. Or, the people around us took it and were too embarrassed to tell us that we would run into a dead-end because they were embarrassed that they ran into a dead-end. Or, the culture has deluded us into believing that it’s not a dead-end at all (even though it looks strikingly similar to a dead-end).

Dead-ends. The only road that I know of that has no dead-ends is the one that God lays out for us. Those are roads of no dead-ends. Rather, those are roads of endless beginnings. Forever beginnings. Perpetual beginnings. Where the world says that the road will stop, the roads God creates keep right on going. When the mountains become too high, or the valleys become too low and the roads come to a screaming halt, God has already constructed a bridge or leveled the valley. “There’s some sort of road that we’re walking.” And if God didn’t create it, your dead-end is just around the ‘corner.’ If He did create it, you don’t need to worry about the ‘corners.’

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