Reflections for July 2, 2015

"And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road."(Matthew 2:12)

Funny reading about the wise men in July, but I always have loved that last line going home by another road.  Generally speaking I'm a creature of habit.  I tend to take the same way when going particular places.  Since having a GPS with live traffic updates I occasionally have been taken to my destination by ways I might not have thought about.  Yet I always get to where I'm trying to go and sometimes faster than the usual route.

Much of life is about taking the same path, having a routine.  We like the familiar, the landmarks along the way that tell us we are getting close.  But there are times when a different road needs to be taken.  That can be frightening because we don't know that way.  There are no familiar landmarks for us to gain a sense of how far we are along the way.  But these other roads can also show us things that we haven't seen before and we may be going that way in order to avoid a real disaster, something that can truly impede our journey.

What I find to be true as I prepare to "journey back to my hometown," is that I know lots of ways to get there, and that my companion on the journey still remains.  And while the journey back to the hometown has taken a while, what I've seen along the way will hopefully make the homecoming sweeter.

Blessings,
Ed