the “wrong” path
Yesterday, a friend of mine told me a story that his pastor shared in church that ended up going semi-viral (I haven’t found the video yet, but I plan to so I can use it talks). The story explained that sometimes we are sent down “wrong paths” so that we can see that we are on the right path once we get back to it.
The story starts with a father and son making a long trip through a desert area, and as they progress along the trip, they come to a fork in the road. Neither of them remembered there being a fork on the map, so they were uncertain about what to do. The son suggested they pray about the decision before them, so they prayed and asked God to give them clarity on which side of the fork to continue down.
After a few moments, the father and son shared that they thought they were supposed to take the road to the right. Since they were both in agreement coming out of their prayer, they headed down the road to the right, only to find out after a short time that the road was a dead end.
Puzzled, they turned back around and made their way back to the fork in the road and headed down the road to the left.
The son asked the father why God had told them both to head down the right road, which was actually the “wrong” road. He didn’t understand why God would steer them wrong–clearly, they were supposed to go down the right road.
The father replied that sometimes God sends you down the “wrong” road so you know that you are on the “right” road when you get back to it. If they had never gone down the right road, they could have questioned whether the left road was the correct one, and the longer they drove without any sight of the city they were traveling to, the more they would doubt themselves.
The doubt might grow so strong that they might turn around when they are just out of sight of the city and head back to the fork to go down the road on the right of the fork only to find out it was a dead end–and at this point they’d be running out of gas in the middle of the desert as the night got colder.
But since they had already seen that the road on the right of the fork was a dead end, they could continue to pursue the road on the left without the fear that they were going the wrong direction. Going down the “wrong” road allowed them to relentlessly pursue the “right” path once they were on it.
How many times have you been sent down the wrong path, only to have it give you the confidence that you were on the right path when you returned to it?
Last night, this story showed up in my life.
Leo spent a good amount of yesterday afternoon skimboarding in the flooded area behind our house–it was the perfect setup for the activity he usually can only do at the ocean. On what was to be his last ride, he lost his balance (his only fall of the day) and landed on a rock hidden in the water, causing a nice gash in his shin. He made his way back up to the house, and Roman and Silas let us know that he was hurt, so when I made it to the garage and took a look at his shin, I was relieved that it didn’t appear that he would need stitches and that he wasn’t hurt nearly as bad as his brothers made it seem.
Leo is our toughest son (and also our most accident-prone), so when he was still in tears and upset thirty minutes later, Ang and I decided we should take him to the ER for an X-ray just to make sure there wasn’t a chip or fracture in his shin.
Obviously, the ER is the last place you want to spend the evening, but we wanted to ensure that Leo was ok. My first inclination was not to go because the optimist in me trusted he was ok–I knew he didn’t need stitches, which he did not get, and I thought he was just sore from banging his shin really hard. But, we all agreed it was worth the trip, and I would have felt horrible if my optimism was wrong and Leo was in pain for longer than he needed to be.
To keep this long story short, Leo’s X-ray came back clean–no break, no chip, nothing to worry about other than a nice cut and some bruising to come.
It was a relief to know he was ok.
And that relief was appreciated even more when Leo woke up at 4:00 AM in tears again because his leg was hurting him. Since we had already been to the ER (our right road at the fork), I could lie with him, knowing that there wasn’t anything else wrong with him. Had we not gone to the ER, I would have laid there wondering if something was wrong and we would have probably ended up at the ER at 4:00 AM.
Yes, the ER trip took away our evening and will take some money out of our savings, but it allowed us to go through the evening without wondering if Leo was hurt more than he was, which, as a parent, is a stress I want to avoid whenever possible.
So, the next time you find your Self on the “wrong” path look for a deeper purpose and realize that maybe you are there for another reason–one of which might be to allow you to pursue the “right” path without a second thought.
See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,
JC
