New Roads To Drive

Driving new roads is an adventure. Seeing where the twists and turns will take you, viewing countryside that, until now, had been inaccessible, and being a part of going where few have yet to go . . . that is the 'fun' of driving a new road. Today I was blessed to drive a new road.

That I was only on the new road for approximately ten miles didn't make a difference. That I was on the new road did make a difference, for you see, really, I am not much of a new road type of person. I like the old familiar roads, the ones where you already know that there is a big pothole just over the rise, the roads whose twists and turns are predictable on those foggy nights, the roads which have a comfortable feel to them as the miles click on the odometer. My kids would tell you, I think, that most of my life is a 'familiar road' kind of life, that 'Dad is quite capable of seeing all sorts of new things every time he drives the same old roads . . . all you have to do is ask him', and that, in the crunch of everyday living, the familiar roads are the kind of places I can retreat to for quiet and personal time.

Yet, every once in a while, it is good for us to drive new roads, to be disquieted by the unfamiliarity, to exist on a higher plain of attentiveness. Every once in a while, it is good to hear different sounds, to be challenged to be a better driver, to have to pay attention to the signs along the way. Every once in a while, new perspectives have to be a part of our living or we risk driving into the sunset of parochialism on the same old roads our ancestors traveled without ever having been in the position of determining our own course of direction.

Are we incapable of having an original thought? Of listening in a new way? Of going on a new course? Are we condemned to the sins of the past because we refuse to be responsible for the actions of the present age? Is our future simply a redriving of the same old roads which enslaved our ancestors? Are we free to claim God's grace? To travel on new roads of understanding? To chart a new direction . . . without fear of damnation?

Jesus is a 'new road person'. In walking the old roads in faithfulness to God, He freed us to walk new roads in responsiveness to the Divine Intention for all people. His counter-cultural approach to faith opened the interior country of new directions as He unapologetically celebrated life with the marginalized and downtrodden, while 'passing by' the old roads of conventional wisdom and tradition. In showering grace and mercy, healing and compassion, acceptance and vulnerability, in the teaching and welcome of the people on the sides of the roads, Jesus reprinted God's maps of salvation in Living Color: He fulfilled God's law in choosing a new road in the Spirit.

Maybe it is time to take new roads more often, in my life and in our lives together. Maybe it is time to travel with Jesus the more uncharted roads of faithfulness. Lord only knows, the roads with which we are most comfortable threaten to take us the farthest away from God's love, going nowhere in a hurry. God keep us on new roads of traveling with Jesus, that the destination we reach is the one You intended all along.

Your servant in Christ,

Pastor Don