Anyone who has traveled by road this summer probably has a "detour story." Detours can be irritating and inconvenient. They slow you down, disrupt your schedule, and may even ruin your plans. Detours make us wonder why and why now?
When we're forced to take a detour, something that may help is seeing if there is there a reason beyond the road construction, the repair or even serious accident that has caused us to take a different route. Are we being taught patience? Is our detour showing us a part of God's creation we would otherwise have missed? Have we avoided something worse if we'd have stayed on our planned road?
Detours often come on our road of life, times when we're prevented from doing what we'd planned or hoped. Illness, bad experience or some kind of loss may cause us to ask "Why?" We want to know why we can't get to our longed-for goal. What is God trying to teach us? Why couldn't He have done it some other way?
In time we may discover the reason, that this "detour" was a better way for us, but right now we can't see it. We may even try to take a different route than the detour signs direct us. (I once took a "better way" and ended up in a field of mud!) Detours are there for a reason, and we'd best stay on the recommended road.
We humans also make sinful detours away from God, into fields of mud and sin that can sink us. That's why Jesus had to take a detour from His eternal glory road to live a few years in this world so that He could help us. His detour led Him to the cross. He went there so we wouldn't have to. Calvary consumed Him for a short time so that we could spend an eternity in heaven.
Let's trust the Lord for what He has done, and follow those road signs!
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