Proverbs 3:5-6  “Trust the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your path”

Maybe you have this where you live too but in my town there is one street that has two different names. It’s a fairly busy street with lots of traffic and so for the newcomers to town it can present quite a challenge. You can be driving up this street and suddenly you realize you aren’t on the same one as before. How did this happen when you didn’t turn a corner?

Then there are those other streets that stop, then start up again somewhere else. You have to zig or zag a bit to find them again. In the town where I grew up there is a railway line running right through the centre of the city but it only has a few crossings. So all the other streets stop dead at the railway line and start again on the other side – but it takes quite a detour to find the same street again. It’s a nightmare for new courier drivers and mail men!

Isn’t that the way it often is on this road we call life? It is so easy to think we are heading in the right direction, on God’s path. Then something subtle changes. We look up and see signs telling us we are headed a new way, even if we did not realize anything had changed. Or we a brought to a dead-end stop with nowhere to go and yet we know this path has not ended yet – we just can’t find our way back onto the same road. How did we get here and how do we get on the right path again? Or, are we still on it and yet God has changed it in some way?

Of course there are times when we become distracted by a song on the radio or our passenger’s conversation and we miss a turn or take the wrong exit. In those times it’s easy to see we have messed up and figure out how to turn around. But life can be more subtle than that. Sometimes we didn’t make a wrong turn or select the wrong road – things just change around us and we lose our bearings.

So how can we know we are on the correct path, even if it seems to have changed names?

By letting someone else drive … His name is Jesus.