Holy Week
Tuesday, April
11, 2017
Train up a child in the way he should go: and
when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6(NLT)
In his magnificent, albeit short poem, The Road Not Taken[ii],
Robert Frost gave us:
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.
I’m certain Mr. Frost had no
intention to tell you of my walk with our dogs last weekend. But we did walk, and I saw the tree(s). There were not roads that diverged, but the
tree, that started out as one, diverged into two, then grew apart in opposite
directions, and eventually parallel in their journey up towards the same sky.
It was something of a metaphor for
me, this strange configuration in the woods.
It tells of how children, born into the same household, can take vastly
different paths out of a common root and yet both push towards a common goal…upward
growth and strength.
I knew two brothers like that. They took different paths in life, one an
educator with an earned doctorate; the other barely survived grade school and
was a construction laborer his entire life.
But both served God with their ways and strength in such different
manners, but such value and honor, I was proud to serve as their pastor, and call
both of them friend.
The verse in Proverbs has been used to comfort many a Christian parent
whose child took the road most-travelled; the one that
leads into the far country of the Prodigal.
Another poet[iii]
wrote about wandering sheep and proclaimed:
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And can't tell where to find them;
Leave them alone, and they'll come home,
Bringing
their tails behind them.
The pure fact is that not all wandering sheep make it back home, and not
all Prodigals have an awakening in the pig pen.
Sometimes the story just doesn’t turn out the way we would craft it.
But for those who would despair over a child’s life-choices, remember
this double-tree divergence metaphor; it does not break down as most do. A tree is meant to grow strong and press on
through the adversities of storms, drought and whatever time can throw at it.
A child, your child, might not choose the path you intended, but, then
again, you’re not God directing that child’s pathway. Some trees serve a more noble purpose than
others, but, like trees, God never placed a child on this earth without purpose. And sometimes (and those times aren’t for any
of us to judge) God’s purpose may look quite different than we would have drawn
on the canvas.
For You Today
Can you rejoice with the noble
oaks in your life? Can you rejoice with
(what looks like) the weeds?
NOTES
I Title
image: By Wilhelm
Hauschild (1827-1887) (www.pittstate.edu/engl/nichols/neuschcastle.jpg) [Public
domain], via Wikimedia Commons
[iii] Mother Goose in The Dorling
Kindersley Book of Nursery Rhymes (2000),
via The
Poetry Foundation
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