Shortcuts

 

When my childhood best friend and I were in elementary school, we had to walk back and forth by ourselves, every day. Ten blocks one way, no matter the weather. (I am a Boomer, which is probably explanation enough.) And yes, "uphill both ways" was involved, since the middle of the route formed a shallow bowl shape. What sloped down on one end had to slope up on the other. 

It didn't take us long to devise a shortcut. If we could get from my friend's house to the top of the bowl "as the crow flies," we reasoned, we should save time and energy, the shortest distance between two points being a straight line and all that. So, instead of using the sidewalks, we trooped up and down the rolling hills across the hospital grounds, tripped and skidded our way through the small woods at their foot, and cheered our victory when we reached the top of the bowl: "Almost there!" By and by, we arrived at school...six times tardy that quarter, as our report cards would later reveal.

Our shortcut was a longcut.

Guess who wasn't allowed to walk to school with her friend for some time.  

Have you ever had seasons of life reminiscent of "forty years in the wilderness" and wondered what God was doing? I know I have. Did you start looking for the shortcut? I know I did. What we fail to realize--or don't want to face--is that God has preparation and character lessons for us along the way. People we need to meet, and who need to meet us. Situations He wants to place us in that need to be developed or arranged before we get there. It's even possible that our imagined shortcuts are longcuts, and when we get to the destination, if we get to the destination, we'll be all out of timing with what should have been there to meet us, and may not be the person we could and should have been when we got there. 

When we don't follow God's path, the destination itself is at risk.

Think of Moses, think of Joseph, languishing on the back side of a desert or forgotten in a prison. When we read their stories, we realize none of it was wasted, but they, living it, didn't have our perspective. We, living it, also lack full perspective. By faith, we want to run the race marked out for us (Hebrews 12:1 NIV), because it isn't just, or mainly, the destination that matters. It's the walk with Jesus.