Stepping In It

It's a beautiful fall day. The sun is beaming down, warming your face against a cool autumn breeze that would chill you if there were a single cloud in the sky. But there are none. The sky is as clear as a fresh glass of water, and the air is so crisp you can see for miles. You are walking at the park, savoring every bit of the season, listening to the laughter of children and enjoying the sense of energy in the air; as if nature herself is pulling together to make you feel alive. Then you step in poop.

Somehow dog poop seems to end up exactly where you want to walk. It's like the soles of our feet have some sort of natural magnetism that draws us to the exact spot where a dog has made a fresh mess. It's awful. For me, it's usually the smell that tips me off first. "What is that? Did you...? Oh no!" Then the wiping of the shoes on the grass, which is completely discouraging because you will never get it all off. The worst part is that it's not just a one time mess up that you can just move on from. When you step in dog poop, it has a way of traveling with you. "It's in the tread of my shoes! How do I keep it from getting in the car? I can't wear these into the house. I don't want to track it up and down the stairs."

Life has a way of directing us toward the messes. You are driving along just fine and your car dies. You are writing an important paper for school and your computer crashes. You are living a healthy life until a small cough turns out to be cancer. You are building a great career and, out of nowhere, you are let go and have to leave everything behind to get a new job in a new city. You were moving forward on what you thought was an easy road through life and, all of a sudden, you step in it.

It's easy in those moments throw your hands up and think that the train of your life has been derailed one too many times. It can seem as if God can't or won't help us in our impossible situation. We can become frustrated and angry at the pointlessness of our needless suffering, because, really...when we take a look at the mess we are in it is nearly impossible to see any purpose behind it. All we can hope to do is not track that mess through every other area of our lives, right?

How can we understand the road we travel? It is the Lord who directs our steps.

Proverbs 20:24

When you are in the middle of your "dog poop moment," it can be really hard to hear a verse like this. On the surface it sounds like it's saying that God directed me right into this mess; he made it happen. My point in this in not to dispute God's sovereignty over our lives, but to point out that we can't fully understand the road we are walking in life. We can't see around every corner or know what the best routes to take are. God does. And what does he do for us in our ignorance of the best way to go? He directs our steps.

I enjoy playing Would You Rather, so here's a question for you. Would you rather walk through a minefield of dog droppings to get a million dollars or keep your shoes clean on the sidelines? We'd all choose the million, but what if you didn't know about the money? Would you still choose to walk through all that mess? Probably not. The good news is that God knows what lies ahead for us. He knows there are million dollar moments waiting for us, and he knows what we need to walk through to get there. Even when you can't understand the road you travel, you can trust God. He knows where you need to be and he will direct your steps to get you there. You can trust him.