I have many, many unfinished posts that I’ve started writing and never finished. I am going to go through many of them and just flush them out into the wild. I have tried to do this before, on several occasions, but started reading a post and began feeling like it really needed to be finished before publishing it. Well, it was deja vous all over again. I started writing again on the posts and failed to finish it– again, keeping it stranded. Many of these posts have some good stuff in them even though they are not finished.
This post was to be about “crooked paths” and how it seems that God often leads people down paths that don’t seem straight. This is often contrary to our religious concept of a “straight and narrow” path that we expect to be the correct one. I wanted to look at that religious concept and compare it to many of the paths that God’s has lead his people down throughout the Bible and see if our concept matches those examples. Well, I only got to the introduction of that concept (after much rambling about my life) and never had time to do all of the verse research for my examples. Maybe one day I will get back to this, but until then, consider this my first “flush” — an unfinished post that I am publishing anyway.
Originally written February, 24 2009:
I haven’t written anything in a long time. For the past several months something deep inside me has wanted to explode out in words, but something has been repressing it. Every time I have sat down to write, something has distracted me. It’s not because I have nothing to write about, so much has been happening in my life since my last post– I just seem stuck.
Recently, I have been turning over and over in my head my direction in life. Over two years ago, I left a great paying software development job to pursue an interest in filmmaking. While I can’t consider my pursuit a failure, it has not taken the direction I expected. I had hoped to be writing and making films that spoke from the eternity in my heart, but that is not what has happened. For many different reasons, I have found myself looking to others for inspiration and motivation– something that I have not found, at least not in the way that I wanted.
Despite the last two years having taken I path that I did not expect, I do not feel that it was the wrong path for me to take. I have met many wonderful people and forged several great friendships, something, that I feel, is always worth the cost. But somehow I have a deep sense that I am off target and steering in a direction without purpose or vision. Every time I try to circle the wagons and regroup, I end up heading off again with no resolution or sense of direction.
Is filmmaking something that I need to be pursuing? The downturn in the economy makes me want to run back to the more profitable world of software, something more stable and significantly more lucrative. But each time I begin to look at software development jobs, I get a sick feeling in my stomach and a deep foreboding begins to creep into my psyche. I don’t understand that reaction, I am looking at jobs that pay 70-90k per year, how could something like that create this dark of a reaction?
I think that the answer is hidden somewhere along my current path. I have a concern about my current direction, but I have no real desire to return to path the was easy and comfortable for me. Why? I think it all has to do with the reason I took a different path in the first place. Creativity. I fear going back to a place where there is no need for that part of me that makes me feel alive. I imagined that filmmaking would put me on a path that would help me tap the deep rivers of life that run within me, helping me to plumb the depths of creativity that God placed in me, one of those important things that make me uniquely– me.
The real problem is that despite working around the industry that I had felt drawn toward, I have yet to parlet that into a deliberate exercise in creativity. For the last two years I have worked on projects that didn’t require much from me creatively. Deep down, I still want to create, I want to make art, but something more sinister is at work preventing me from doing that very thing. I don’t know if it is just pure laziness or if it is some covert fear of failure that is bridling me and holding me back from doing those things that I need to be doing.
For many years I was afraid, because I was under a dogmatic assumption that God doesn’t want his children working in the film industry– something that I later came to believe was simply imagined and not actually based in who God is and what He does in and with his people. Not something I simply conjured to make me okay with something, but based on prayer and the doors that seemed to open at just the right time, when I simply rested in God’s sovereignty and stopped living a life driven by a misguided religious fear.
I don’t say this to suggest that there are jobs that are “okayed” by God and others that aren’t– I don’t believe that God operates that way. Sometimes, based on my life experience, God will allow you to take a certain path, only to lead you to another one. There have been a number of times in my life that I have taken paths that I couldn’t have imagined that God would be okay with, but discovered that something wonderful in my life would not have been possible without it.
I don’t understand the ways of God. In the book of Isaiah there is a verse that becomes more and more true the older I get:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
—Isaiah 55:8-9
I know more now than at any other time in my life, that God doesn’t do things the way that I expect Him to. Almost all of my religious fears are based on assumptions and conclusions that I have made about God, but the more I become acquainted with the people that God used in the Bible, the more I realize that God almost always does what is unexpected and uses that people who are often the wrong type of person or someone who is on what seems to be the wrong path.
While I worry about not being creative and not living up to what God has created me for, God is simply taking me down a road that exposes my fears and doubts and constantly compels me to put off my anxieties and simply rest in Him. The more I rest in what God has already done for me, the less I worry about what I am doing wrong and simply look for the doors that are opening to me and taking that paths that appear before me. The more I trust in Him, the more I cant’ help but realize that exact path is not issue, it is the walk that matters.
There are many verses in the Bible about “paths.” Those who want condemn a certain path will pull out Matthew 7:13+14 which declares that “wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction” with the compelling that one should only take the “narrow road that leads to life.” The problem with such a misplaced criticism is that it is usually imposed on by someone who has the “narrow road” pre-defined without any understanding or experience of being “led to life”… or even more importantly, the experience of having God actually lead them down a crooked road.
Would God lead someone down a crooked road? I think that the answer is best know through experience, but certainly if He would, then there should be evidence in the Bible. I think that the first solid example of such a path would be Abraham…
Sorry that I never got around to finishing this one, certainly such a study would be one worth doing. How about digging into this and posing some of our own insights and experiences?
