The Road Less Traveled

I used to be zealous for the Lord when I was first touched by His grace.  My deliverance, my healing, my salvation was new and fresh and I felt that everything else about my life was also new and fresh.  But as I have grown older the first blush has faded from that early bloom.  It’s not that my Christianity has tarnished or rusted and is now somehow a poor representation of what it once was, it’s just that I see my life lived as a follower of Christ in a different light that is somewhat molded by the reality around me.  The image of the ideal may no longer burn brightly inside of me, but the tempered reality of the foundation is still present, and I think that I am stronger because of it.  Somewhere along my spiritual journey the proverbial two roads diverged in the woods.  The first led into correct dogmatics and doctrine and it was very enticing to me for many years.  I struggled to get my doctrine just right and force my belief to match that doctrine, but I found that year by year it was hard to live by doctrine.  It tended to separate me from a lot of good things that filled my life, it put a hardened edge on me that always needed to be right and to make black and white pronouncements, and it turned out to be a cruel taskmaster that always demanded a lot of me but gave very little in return.  So I retraced my steps back to the other path and found that the more I walked down it, the less sure I was of anything.  Things I once considered sacrosanct were looked at in a different way, things I felt imperative to hold onto now weighed me down and had to be left at the roadside, convictions were examined and tested to see whether I would still stake my life on their tenets.  But somehow this road feels right and I am sure that ultimately it will lead me to the final destination I seek.  I don’t see as clearly as I used to think I once did when everything was new and fresh, and I find myself saying quite often “I see men as trees walking” and asking for a second touch from Jesus.  But that’s all right.  To go back to the poem about the two paths diverging, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”