Yesterday, I told you about my, albeit short, life of crime. Thankfully, I was steered in the right direction pretty early in life.
Going the (literal) right direction sometimes was difficult in my family. I remember one time we were headed to LaGrange to see my aunts and really got off the beaten path. To understand this, you must know that it was my Nannie, my mama’s mama, who’d never driven a car giving Mama directions as she drove. Nannie grew up in a time when they still rode wagons and I assumed that we were taking one of her old wagon routes. (Like there hadn’t been about 70 years in between her wagon days and this road trip.) It all started when we were on our normal route but a bridge was out. There were no detour signs and this was well before there was GPS. We had maps but they were for more luxurious destinations other than Troup County, Georgia, like Florida. And we were a long way from Florida.
I can remember Nannie telling her to try going this direction but Mama said she was going to go another direction. Every turn, it seemed like Mama went the opposite way of where Nannie thought we should go. We kept going until we ended up, literally, in the middle of a cow pasture. I thought for sure we’d be lost forever and a cow might just want to eat me. (Yes, that was way before I realized they were herbivores. I just knew they had sharp looking horns and liked to chew things.) Somehow, we back tracked our way out of there and I was, thankfully, not eaten by a ravenous cow. Nannie recounted her directions and soon enough, we were back to a road that we recognized. For years, we laughed about this story because of how Mama got us so lost.
But as I’ve grown up, it has taken on a little bit of a different meaning. That day, Mama thought she knew what she was doing. She knew Nannie had never driven a car so surely, her advice couldn’t be correct. Could it? She had never been down that path, or so Mama thought, so she couldn’t possibly know how to get through there. Isn’t that how it is with God’s plans for our lives sometimes? Sure, God knows everything and we know that but still insist on giving our directions. Nannie sat by quietly in the car that day and didn’t argue or fuss. She just let Mama keep on going 20 miles out of the way. God does the same thing. Sometimes, we ask God for a sign along the path that we wanted to travel rather than the one He wanted us to travel. “I know where I’m going” turns into “Fix it God.”
Sometimes God will fix it quickly, like Nannie did that day with her directions. Sometimes, God will sit in the car and make us think on it a bit before saying, “Move over, I’ve got this.” He might even hit you with a flip flop or two just to get the point across. I tend to be the “I know where I’m going” and flip flop survivor kind of gal most of the time. I blame that partly on the long line of hard-headed women I come from in my family. But here lately, I’ve been the “I’m on my knees begging you, God, lead the way” kind of gal. There’s no shame in telling God that you have messed up, even if it’s a long time of messing up. God will show up. That’s where faith comes in. When you’re in the cow pasture, worried the cows will eat you, you’ve gotta do the only thing you can do and that is to listen to what God is saying. He doesn’t want you eaten by a cow (duh, herbivores) but our worry sometimes magnifies the problem. You’ve probably heard it said before, what is too big for you is just right for God. So as I sit, in the cow pasture with the cows chewing, the cow patties falling, and the flies buzzing, I know that MY God will show up.
But the best part? God isn’t going to tell me “I told you so.” Instead, like Nannie, he’s going to quietly steer me back to the path that I was destined to be on in the first place. It’s there He might whop me in the face with the flip flop before it’s all over. But, hopefully, from there I will be headed in the right direction with no shame of knowing who truly knows how to get there.
Messpot Diaries 