![[Photo two forked roads]](https://www.deankwilson.com/Blog_images/two_roads_diverged_in_the_woods.jpg)
| “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.” The light softens, as it filters through the trees. Sometimes, the sounds of animals and birds stop suddenly and a sense of danger rises in our thoughts. We look around, but we see nothing except the trees. Our ears focus intently on the silence. Our breathing slows.
Please, may I share a true story with you?
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 had become invisible.
There was an eerie and spooky feeling in those woods, and also something “cool” about standing very still in even a very small patch of trees. 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. Unlike the fantasy of my childhood small patch of trees, in life our “lost-ness” can become quite terrifying.
King Solomon might well have been thinking about a deep forest path when he wrote these words found 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. We can make a conscious choice as to which direction we will choose to go. We will select the road we will follow.
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 that, in doing so, they will take “the road less traveled.” And, I firmly believe that choice will, indeed, make all the difference.
Based on a blog originally posted on Friday, June 12, 2015
