As I was out on my early morning walk with the dog a few days ago, I noticed several worms and worm tracks in the soft dirt road. The worms would emerge onto the road and proceed in a relatively straight manner for a brief time, but then one by one they would start turning haphazardly, circling around, doubling back on themselves, ultimately stranding themselves in the middle of the road where they became easy targets for the birds perched in the overhanging trees. The worms, who lack sight but have receptors that can tell them if it is light or dark, were not designed to operate on top of the road, and without vision, they were unable to see the best route to safety. For the mistake of venturing out onto the road, the near certain end for the worms was death.
Far too many of us are like those worms. We started boldly out on a straight line, believing that we were heading where we wanted to go. Yet at some point in the journey, we realized that we couldn’t see where our objective was. For some, we forgot what we wanted, or got distracted by something else, or encountered difficulties that caused us to doubt if we were headed in the right direction. So, we started wandering a bit to the left or a bit to the right, and over the span of increasingly lengthening days, weeks, months, and years, our course corrections got us turned so far off course that we were completely lost.
The strange thing is that we can easily get just as lost once we have reached the goal that we had been striving for all of our lives, because we didn’t realize how much life was left to live after reaching that goal. As it turns out, that goal that we attained was in the middle of the road, and not on the other side, and now we have to figure out how to get safely beyond to the opposing edge. Retirement presents just as much of an opportunity to start turning astray, as the guidelines that had previously led to success are now absent and slight jostling to the right or left send us into unfamiliar territory.
It turns out that our lives do really benefit from having some sort of guidance that can direct us beyond our own ability to see. Proverbs 29:18 states “Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint; but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction.” God’s wisdom is there for our taking, and His revelation shows us the path forward – the path that we were created to follow. And the true blessing of this revelation is that it doesn’t matter if we’ve been wandering around in circles in the middle of the road for our entire lives. We simply need to trust the One who can actually see the entire road, and lean not on our own understanding, for the way that seems right to us will surely lead to death while His way will lead us to our fullest expression of life.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron