I go on detours. Sometimes it seems like the detours take more time than the actual race. I have spent years in ditches, weeks on mountain ranges (just look at those clouds!), days meandering in meadows or swamps. If life were a finish-first type race, this would be devastating.

Life is not a finish-first type race; it is a finish-strong type race. Thank God.

Detours may be off the path, but I cannot deny how those detours inform how I walk the path when I return. Falling from heights has made me grateful, truly humble. Being chased from swampland by an alligator has made me think of it as the safest foundation. God pulling me up from the ditch has me dancing, not walking, on the rock beneath my feet. Every detour has only made the path more beautiful, more certain, more alluring. And while my desire to remain on this path grows with each detour, I find my tendency to stray no less.

What does this mean?

Only that after such a long detour this past several months of swimming in perspectives that glorify human experience, grasping at understanding like one who does not know he is in the dark, accepting reasoning that falls short of gospel-reasoning, I come up for air and find that the path is still here; the Ancient of Days is, in fact, still unchanged.

And my greatest problem is still — not the society I live in, the pain I feel, my coping mechanisms, DNA or even the sin of others — my greatest problem is my own sin. My own rebellion, my own hard-heartedness, my own selfishness, greed, and pride. And while all those other problems exist, if I attempt to understand them outside of the deep knowledge that my greatest problem has been gloriously solved for all eternity, I will despair.

Lately I have felt like I need to untangle all that I have gone through as a child and young adult, and spending so much time reading about the life experiences of others. I have been reading some (really good) parenting advice and I dipped my toes into the waters of psychology again as a means of trying to understand myself and how on earth I might heal a soul and body that has been through more than some people experience in twice as many years. YouTube recommended a channel about healing from cPTSD. The word “safety” keeps coming up in terms that my ancestors would have had a good laugh over. A dirty house makes you feel “unsafe”? Lipschein, I think the word you are looking for is “uncomfortable”.

One step into the waters of psychology quickly pulls me under, as these are the waters of my youth. I go from just wanting a little more context than I can find in scripture for my particular areas of struggle to breathing the water of God-outside-the-world, not relevant to the everyday, insufficient or indifferent to my emotional distress. God wasn’t enough to explain, so He lets me see how far I get without Him. Turns out, not far. I go from feeling like I am walking a narrow road with a small lamp at my feet to plunged in total darkness, no path at all, only a relentless tidal wave that batters me and threatens to pull me under.

The most upside-down thing is what brings me topside: a reminder that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood”; a reminder that the gospel tells me my biggest struggle isn’t a body that “keeps score”, a brain full of faulty wiring, or even my own understanding of how to deal with those things. My biggest problem is that I am prone to take detours.

The detours are not the problem; I am not the problem; I am simply a human being who wanders like we all do. My choosing to take the detours — that choosing is the problem. But thanks be to God, I know the path. So many do not. So I am confronted today with a blessing that does not look like one until you see the other side of it: I have sinned and I can repent.

God uses all these things for good. Some of this I see; some of this I must trust. But this I know after so much wandering, so much meandering — He even uses my sin.

So I am going to publish this and it will probably serve more to confuse than edify, so if you have read this far let me leave you with something unequivocal:

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. He didn’t come primarily to bring rest to the weary (though He does), to bring justice to earth (though He will), or to make us “better people” (though we find in the course of following Him we have no choice but to look more like Him who is infinitely better than all we can ask or imagine). Jesus, on the cross, solved our biggest problem. When things get heavy or confusing, start there. You might just find yourself asking Him to keep you near.