Daily Archives: April 21, 2016

The Right Road

Uphold my steps in Your paths, that my footsteps may not slip.

Psalms 17:5

My husband and I were nearing the end of a long journey. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the rain was pouring steadily. We came to what we thought was an intersection where we could go either straight or turn right or left. My husband,in his tired condition, decided to go straight. We quickly found out that we had chosen an alternative that wasn’t there. We were on a high bank with our car dangerously close to tipping over. We carefully got out of the car, walked through the rain to a nearby motel, and called a wrecker. We spent the night in the motel, then continued our trip the next day.

Many of us take the wrong roads in life and we end up on a cliff, in great danger of tipping over. The rain, the dark, and our fatigue kept my husband and me from seeing reality that scary rainy night. Often, I feel my clients are blinded by misperceptions they have carried with them through life. And it is difficult to choose the right road in life when you can’t see it.

Let’s make it our goal in life to find the truth. Our faith in God and His Word will guide us there. When truth is hidden we will continually make errors in judgment. But when we see the truth, we will begin to make wise decisions.

Thought: Truth leads to the right road, so I will look for it by meditating today on God’s Word.

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Head in the Sand

“Can anyone hide himself in several places, so I shall not see him?” says the Lord.

Jer. 23:24

Stick your head in the sand and you don’t have to know what’s going on around you. People who play this game think that if they deny their problems or put off facing them, the problems  will go away. But the problem with the head in the sand trick is you eventually have to come up for air.

Sometimes we as counselors feel like lifeguards going around the beach and saving people from suffocating by pulling their heads out of the sand and then some of them want to stick their heads back in! I once  had a patient I had rescued say to me,” If I had known sane people were so crazy, I would have stayed crazy.”

Very few problems disappear when we avoid them; we must eventually face what we’re hoping will go away. Denial is like believing in magic. We somehow think  that pretending a problem isn’t there will cause it to be solved by someone else or simply fade away. That rarely happens.

Avoiding pain by procrastination and denial is usually the route to prolonging problems and making them worse. Let’s pull our head out of the sand and face the challenges of life today.

Thought:  Denying my conflicts causes significantly more personal pain than facing them and devising plans to overcome them. I will ask God’s help in facing my problems today.