If you were walking down one of our beautiful tree-lined dirt roads, looking ahead to admire the view, you would occasionally see places where the width of the road expands quite noticeably. In some places, it seems as though the road is at least 50% wider. It is only as you get closer that you can see what has caused that to happen. In those places where the roads have spread beyond their natural edges, depressions have formed within the normal travel lane. Some of those depressions are quite deep, and all of these areas are among the roughest and bumpiest to drive through. When it rains, they represent the sort of spot where you wonder if you can safely get through.
Before I go any further, please know that this is not a complaint against our County employee Greg. Greg is a friend of mine, and for nearly two decades he and I have talked about our roads and what it takes to maintain them. He does his best with the equipment and resources that have been provided by the County. When your equipment doesn’t work, it is difficult to get work done the way that it needs to be done.
Back to the roads. Ultimately what has happened is that, due to the different types of dirt that comprise our road surfaces, puddles form in some parts of the road and not in others. When we drive through those puddles, the water splashes and carries with it some of the dirt that had been in that puddle. If there are no edges on the side of the road to catch the dirt, it just spills over the edges. As this cycle continues, the holes in the road get deeper, and the road seemingly gets wider. Ultimately the puddles get so deep and wide that people are driving around them if they can, onto places that used to be beyond the edge of the road. When the waters finally dry up, we are left with deep depressions and wider roads.
Our lives can be like this. Whether we like it or not, and whether we agree or not, we as humans were designed with certain operating parameters. There are things that we cannot do, and there are also things that we should not do – physically and behaviorally. It is up to us to decide whether or not we are going to allow those parameters to govern our lives. As we live our lives, we inevitably have places where the rain that we encounter creates a puddle or two. At some point, we can decide whether or not those puddles will push our lives beyond our natural edges – whether we will take our lives “off road” and create a new road, or at least expand the road to places where it wasn’t meant to go, or stay within the parameters.
What we don’t tend to realize is that when we try to make the road wider to avoid the depressions that are formed, we don’t actually improve the road. Those depressions remain, and will only get worse if we don’t deal with them. As for the expansion of the road, sooner or later we find out that we had no right to go there and we find ourselves being pushed back into the area that we tried to avoid dealing with. So it goes with our own human experience. We ultimately harm ourselves worse if we think the best way to deal with a situation in our lives is to just avoid it, drive around it, and even create a new road where we were never meant to travel.
Who knew that thinking about dirt roads could get so deep?
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron