Forks in the Road

I’m amused by a comment I heard someone use in explaining how they ended up somewhere they weren’t intentionally going. As I recall, the comment was, “I came to a fork in the road and took it.”

A road can be as winding, twisting, turning, double-backing and up-and-down as it wants to be and it’s easy to follow it to the end as long as it doesn’t also fork.

Where we get into trouble is when we are faced with choices.

Here in the United States, we revel in choices. The more choices, the better. We want twenty different cell phones to choose from; we want a hundred different flavors of ice cream or soda pop or dessert.

I don’t know about you, but there is such a thing as too many choices. Standing in line at the local ice cream shop, poring over all the types of ice cream (real ice cream, low fat ice cream, sherbets, frozen yogurts) and all the different flavors (vanilla, chocolate, Peanut Butter Cup, Rocky Road, etc.) can be a time consuming and sometimes overwhelming decision! Goodness, look at all the varieties of chocolate ice cream! Even vanilla has its options.

I don’t have the capability (or the time!) to try every flavor of ice cream in the ice cream shop, even if I did have the will.

There is one thing I’m glad I don’t have to make a choice over. Salvation. If it’s so difficult to make choices involving ice cream or soda pop or the color of the shirt I wore today, there’s no way I’m equipped to decide the best path to salvation.

Fortunately, I don’t have to make that decision. It’s already been made for me.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

John 14:1-7

Jesus Christ provided the only option we need to find salvation. If life were a burning airplane, He has stood at the head of the cabin and pointed to way out of the wreckage (the cross).

“Here!” He calls. “Come this way!”

I don’t need to know anything else. I need only to follow. In a life filled with uncertainty even in the best of times, that’s what I need and want. Not a hundred choices but one, clearly marked exit that takes me from a life of enslavement to sin into freedom from that bondage.

If I’m truly in search of salvation, the only choice I have to make is this.

Do I accept that gift or do I reject it?

Do you stay in your seat in the burning wreckage of your life or do you follow the implicit call of Christ pointing the way to the exit?