Spring is here!
We’ve been enjoying some beautiful weather here in Nebraska!
The other morning, it was so nice out that I decided Ace and I would leave the car behind and walk the half-mile to his preschool.
In my mind, I was excitedly picturing a sweet morning of quality time walking hand-in-hand with my smiling 4-year-old.
What I forgot to consider was that it had just snowed a few days earlier. So this beautiful warm weather had melted everything into slushy, muddy puddles.
Puddles are Ace’s kryptonite.
Still hand-in-hand, I started pulling on Ace, trying to avoid every puddle so I could get him to school in decent condition, while he was pulling the other direction determined to splash in every puddle in sight.
And just like that, our short half-mile walk melted into a half-mile disaster!
It didn’t take long before both of us were frustrated with each other.
We were both trying to get to school, but had very different ideas on how to get there.
Ace’s was soaking wet and mud-covered.
Mine was trying to spare his nice school sneakers.
A couple times Ace would jump up and I’d pull him away to miss the intended puddle landing.
Other times, he’d catch me off guard and I ended up in the splash zone at a muddy Sea World.
We finally got to school, much muddier than I had planned. I kissed his head and he went running in with the other kids to his teacher.
On my solo walk back, I could feel God tugging at my heart.
I love so much how our God is so relational that He teaches in even the mundane of a Wednesday morning walk to school.
I started thinking about how in life, a lot of times, the condition of the paths God leads us on doesn’t look the way we expected.
In the Book of Proverbs, it says,
“We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps.” Proverbs 16:9 (NLT)
The New International Version puts it this way,
“In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.” Proverbs 16:9 (NIV)
It’s easy for us to see where we want to be one day, especially in areas where our hearts need healing.
However, the condition of the path we’ll need to take to get there probably looks differently than how God knows it’s actually going to be.
This verse reminds me that there will be times in my walk with God where He asks me to step my foot into somewhere that does not look like what I had in mind.
I typically picture my path of healing the same way I initially pictured my walk with Ace to school: cautious and as uneventful as possible.
In reality, it usually looks a lot like the actual path we took with muddy puddles and soaked shoes.
We’re faced with a choice when we see that first puddle coming up in our path; where it looks like God’s path is messier and more uncomfortable than we were expecting.
We can decide to turn around and go right back to the comfort of where we started.
But in doing that, aren’t we telling God we don’t trust His way for us?
Our other option is to keep ahold of God’s Hand and make that first splash!
Maybe that means jumping into having that difficult conversation with someone.
Or taking the first step to break that habit that doesn’t belong in your life anymore.
Whatever God’s asking us to jump into, we can put our rain boots on and jump in!
Not because it’s going to be comfortable, or that we even want to do what God’s asking of us all the time.
We probably won’t even know how deep that puddle is until we get in there.
But, none of that really matters when we know that we can trust the One who’s telling us this puddle is a necessary part of our path.
We just need to trust the Hand we’re holding.
If your honest prayer is for God to lead you, then some days you’re going to get muddy!
Are you living your life as if the goal is to get to the end of the day looking exactly how you were when you started? If that’s how we live our life, we will never get anywhere. We will never grow. We will never change.
But what if instead of ending everyday just as clean and dry as we started, we climbed into bed with a trace of leftover mud from that puddle God asked us to jump into and we chose to jump?
That’s when we grow.
That’s when we change.
That’s when we heal.
My prayer this week is instead of rearranging our paths to avoid the puddles God has in front of us, we put our rain boots on ready to jump into whatever God asks of us that day.
From one of His children to another,
Christi