Our Sense of Direction

As this Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close, I walk away wondering what I have learned. Being thankful naturally causes you to ponder your own blessings (of which I have many more then I deserve), but hopefully in addition to my thankfulness I will walk away a bit more shaped by His chisel then I was before.

I think the most significant thing I have learned this weekend is that there is no direction other than the direction of His path that I need to be concerned about.

There are many things (and people) in this world that will try to sway you from Him; anything to get your off balance. The enemy is at work, but rarely in the places you're expecting him to be. He comes dressed to kill your soul, and often enough he starts with the heart.

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me" Psalm 51:10

The picture above was taken on a trip my wife and I took recently on a little weekend getaway without the children during one of our hikes. It was a most amazing tree that somewhere along its early days was reshaped by something or someone and ended up growing horizontally. While living and well, it still grew horizontally, not vertically. My wife reflected on the picture saying it reminded her of how we try to work so hard on our horizontal relationships, and forget about the most important vertical relationship we all need in Him; well stated. However there was no better words that could caption this picture then what my oldest (Amelia) stated when she saw the picture ... she simply said "It lost its sense of direction"

How often we let outside forces spin us around in circles so much we simply lose our sense of direction. We may be alive and well, like this "middle-aged" tree, just doing what it can to grab the sunlight all the while not realzing that it has been compromised ... that we ... have been compromised.

There is only one path that matters, all others are meaningless.

Lord, may I never lose my sense of direction.

Yours