No Straight Line

How God Takes Your World, Turns it Upside Down, and Turns You Back Around

As one examines nature, one finds very few straight lines in its creation. This is a subject of debate, but more often than not, the spiral or nautilus shape is the center point of nature’s organic structure. Whenever you pass a field of majestic sunflowers, closer observation would confirm this spiral, spherical, template. Some would say, what about trees, they look pretty straight? Yes, until one is cut down and its spherical growth rings are made visible to the eye.

The BIG picture is this: like nature, most of the time, your journey is anything but a straight line! How many times can you honestly say that your life followed a perfectly straight line from point A to point B? Truthfully, life is often an unpredictable meandering, rife with unforeseen twists and turns, false starts, and cyclic diversions that appear to deter one from their visionary objective. You have undoubtedly heard the old maxim, “You can’t get there from here.” Nobody knew that better than the wilderness pioneers, the children of Israel.

Think about it. When Moses led the Israelites out of their bondage in Egypt, their destination, measured by a straight line, should have taken them roughly two weeks! Instead, though, they wandered aimlessly in the desert for forty years! Maybe you are asking yourself the million-dollar question, “Why?” Because, dear friend, when it comes to the delays that are rarely denials, there is ALWAYS a method in what we view as God’s madness.

You see, our journey, complete with its seasons of running in circles and chasing our tails, is never for naught, but instead, a life lesson to be learned. God is the master of using what we view as inconveniences or failures as priceless opportunities to arrive at our destination as different people!!!

Like us, the children of Israel had some issues. Their forty-year desert experience is precisely what it took to get them out of Egypt and to get “Egypt” out of them! Forty years to change a corrupt mind into a heart of integrity is worth the delay, if arriving in two weeks meant they learned nothing from their journey and remained a corrupt people living in The Promised Land on schedule.

Sometimes, God has to “mess up” our life just long enough to change us, so that our life is one worth living. Here is my question: Would you rather have what you want when YOU want it? Or would you rather get what you want when you’re actually READY to receive it?

Your answer will speak volumes if integrity is your ultimate goal. When you arrive at the place of understanding that God is smarter than you, and knew everyday of your journey before you were even created, you will embrace every frustrating failure, each unforeseen twist and turn, and every hardship as an opportunity to become everything you always desired to be. Then, and only then, will you possess the character that it takes to carry the blessings you desired and hold on to them forever.

May this be your legacy … I promise, it will be worth the wait! The most economical path between two points is a straight line, but unfortunately dear friend, that only works on a GPS!