Sometimes I don’t want to. Really.
Have you ever had an assignment and you just didn’t want to finish it? Most of us have.
We live with extended power cuts. I don’t like it but there’s little I can do to convince the power company to give us more power. What’s worse than a power cut is a power cut coupled with the water company cutting the water supply.
When we have power and water together, often from the late hours of the night into early hours of the morning, I will get up to wash clothes. I am fortunate enough to have a washing machine so I can’t complain! But I still don’t want to get up at 2:00 a.m. to wash clothes. Unless I do it, there won’t be clean clothes so I really don’t have a choice. I simply get up and do it. When it’s all said and done, it was good that I got up. Our clothes are clean. It feels good to get it done but the doing was not so pleasant.
Many crossroads
Every day I come to many crossroads where I have to choose which way to go, which way is best, which way holds greater benefit. Benefit for who? Greater benefit for others. I don’t do the laundry just for myself (there would be an all-out revolt if that were to happen, could you imagine??). And I don’t check my daughter’s homework for myself (although she thinks I do). Nor do I make sure there’s dinner on the table for myself (husband wouldn’t appreciate if I chose only what I like, things that include foods that he detests!). There’s a domino effect on making choices for the sake of others, often to our own perceived detriment.
So I don’t want to but I do anyway.
I don’t want to
As a parent I don’t want to leave my children behind in the USA as I chase the dream to plant churches and outreaches in Africa.
I don’t want to start all over again without a team, having to do everything. Who really wants to be the chosen one to start a school, teach new converts, lead children’s church, and make sure the meeting area is clean?
I don’t want to walk my youngest through this, it would be so much easier not to have to explain the call of God to faraway lands to her.
But I know that choice would end in misery. So I choose the road that seems rough, full of potholes and detours over the well-paved highway.
So a lot of what I live is out of obedience, knowing the choice I’ve made will bring me to the best result.
But it’s not easy. It’s far from easy.
But it’s better, far better than taking the other road.
Psalm 118:27 NLT “The Lord is God, shining upon us. Take the sacrifice and bind it with cords on the altar.”
The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost
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.
