The Correct Path

 

“ There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.”

— Proverbs 14:12

Have you ever hiked into a dense woods, stopped in the center of it, turned around and thought, “How easy it would be to get lost.”

Not far from where I grew up on one of the main streets in the little city of Bradford, Pennsylvania, there was a patch of woods that occupied probably no more than half-an-acre. As an elementary school-age kid, I used to go there and pretend I was lost and no one could find me.

I would stand very still, taking slow shallow breaths. The sounds around me seemed to increase in volume the more quiet I became.

I could hear the skittering of small creatures as they moved through the underbrush. I could hear birds calling and answering. I could hear leaves rustling in the soft breeze.

Once, I heard voices as two older children took a shortcut through the woods. I stood very still. Even though they passed within a few feet of me, they never saw me. It was if I had blended into the forest shadows and become invisible.

There was an eerie and spooky feeling and also something “cool” about standing very still in even a very small patch of deep woods. I felt both invisible and invincible. I felt fully in command of my surroundings. I was the king of the forest.

Of course, I knew I was only a few yards from safety—no matter which direction I would walk. But, to this only child, there was something fascinating and very mysterious about the forest. Already used to living as a “loner,” I fairly soaked in the aloneness of that moment.

The milieu of our lives has deep-forest-like characteristics. If we stray too far off the right pathway, we can become seriously lost.

King Solomon might well have been thinking about a deep forest path when he wrote these words in Proverbs 14:12:

There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.

So the pathway that winds its way through our lives offers us a choice. Robert Frost enshrined this thought in his famous poem “The Road Not Taken” from the collection Mountain Interval, penned in 1920:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Believers who choose to obediently follow Jesus, will find they take “the road less traveled.”And, I firmly believe that choice will, indeed, make all the difference.

 

_{Copyright © 2015 by Dean K. Wilson. All Rights Reserved.}

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