Running a Path to Nowhere

I had just a few moments before time to reign in the chaos and put dinner on the table.  I slipped out onto the back deck with a glass of water and collapsed wearily into a chair.  Somewhere inside the house children were giggling and wild.  Two began to argue, their angry bickering filtering out to me through open windows.  I dropped my head into my hands, closed my eyes and sighed.

God reached down into my mind and stirred tendrils of memory….

The trail was terrible.  Washed out places here, logs fallen over there.  All along the edges tall grass and shrubs clogged the way.  Just terrible.  But….I kept on running.  “Maybe it will clear in a moment,” I thought.  “It’s not that bad…” I lied to myself.

Thorns clawed at my bare legs.

“It’s better than no trail at all…”

Then, suddenly….the trail was just gone and I was skidding to a stop to keep from splashing into the muck beyond it.  There I stood – bloody, muddy and exasperated.  All of that pain and misery, and it led to nothing at all.

The memory faded as God whispered…

“Are you at the end of the path, child?  Are you ready to listen?”

Sometimes life is like that isn’t it?  We so want whatever path we have chosen to be the right path that we ignore all signs to the contrary.  We just keep waiting for it to get better, or lie to ourselves that it is not so bad after all.  We don’t even stop to ask God if it really is His plan for us.  We are already committed.  Invested.  Oh, so noble and all the while finding ourselves moment by moment filthier and more wounded.  Then, to our dismay and shock we find we are standing at the end.  The end of our possibilites, our strength, our hope…

The end of ourselves.

And the beginning of something infinitely better.

“Father, I’m tired.  I need help.  I’m going to ask you for the moon, the stars and everything in betweeen…”

It must have been what He was waiting for all along.