Why am I always lost in the woods?” I yell at the top of my voice! And if I choose to settle down for a moment and be honest with myself, I’ll rather reluctantly admit that I drew the map.

My decisions determine my destination long before I ever get there. And once I do get there, I suddenly realize this is not the destination I had in mind because what I had in mind was the fantasy that my denial had created verses the reality my choices crafted.

Underneath the chaos there stirs a great plan. And it will be birthed only if I give it permission to do so because I have exercised the faith that it’s there.

It is not within my power to refuse the journey of life regardless of the nature of my fears or the depth of my selfishness, for the definitions of ‘journey’ and ‘life’ are indistinguishably synonymous. I can however sufficiently inhibit them and amply fight them to the point that I have accepted the journey, but the journey is now solely defined as my effort to forsake the journey.

Darkness should never be an excuse to quit, for with God, darkness is the exact stuff that light was built for.

If I have found my journey to be a maddening tangle of wandering ‘rabbit-trails,’ a labyrinth of incessantly circular passages to nowhere and back, and a plethora of assorted ‘dead-ends’ fraudulently disguised as paths of great promise, it can only be because I have mindlessly exchanged God’s compass for mine. Therefore, it would appear that another exchange might be in order.

Consequences need not be the obstacles that I dread, but the direction that I need.

If I haven’t determined where tomorrow is going to be, I have no idea what today is about.

I want to ‘think’ that I have all the answers. But if I ‘think’, I soon realize that what I thought to be answers were guesses. And if I ‘think’ yet again, I begin to realize that since God has all the answers He never hands me a guess.