Are You Sure This Is The Right Way? Re-routed Off The Highway Into the Wilderness

I drove three and a half hours to a writing conference last week, checked into a motel and woke up the next morning in pain.  Only those who have suffered a tooth ache can understand the pain I am talking about.  That morning, the pain was tolerable.  After all, I had driven 211 miles in great anticipation of this meeting.  I could handle it.  And as a runner and four-time mom, I am no stranger to pain.  I mean, like, how bad can a little bitty tooth be?  The pain was noticeable, but at this point, no big deal.  I took a couple of extra-strength Tylenol and plowed ahead.  I would just make an appointment to see the dentist after the weekend.  By that same afternoon, it was a big deal.  After a sleepless night, I realized I was going to have to go home.  There was no way I could wait until Monday – three excruciating days away -- to get help.  I called.  My dentist, who doesn’t work on Fridays, was working on Friday.  The specialist who I needed to see had a last minute cancellation.  I will spare you the gruesome details, but God clearly had made all the arrangements.  I drove home with a throbbing beat pounding in my head, not unlike the boom, boom, boom of loud music in a teenager’s car. 

When I was visiting my granddaughter last month, we read and re-read a book about Dora the Explorer that was based on questions to the reader:  Where are we going?  What will we need to get there?  What is the best way?  And what will we find at the end of the road?

In real life, sometimes you just don’t know.  Sometimes God reroutes us from the well-paved highway of our own plans and send us, well, to a place of His own choosing off the map, full of purpose we cannot see, goodness beyond our recognition, a gravel road not yet taken, to a place where He dwells.  There are no detours in God’s global positioning system, no glitches in His plans, and incredible meaning even in that which we don’t understand.

I may never know why I had to leave the conference so early.  It may have seemed to me an inconvenient time for a tooth infection, but it didn’t take God by surprise.  It never does.  God redeems.  And as I have learned over and over again:  I have seen too much to question God in this.

 

Behold I am doing a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

and rivers in the desert.

                                         Isaiah 43.19