The longest route...

There is no easy way around it, sometimes I take the hardest possible route to get anywhere.  During our re-make of our house, I purchase bar stools.  Our counter island is tall and so I measured t – it was 36 inches from the ground.  Therefore I purchased 29 inch bar stools thinking they would be perfect…  And they would have been had I measured from the ground to the trim that lines the bottom of the 36”.  In reality, I had 29” to play with and the stools that I purchased were tight against the lip under the island.  I put one together and realized my folly.  Looking on-line, I didn’t find any more that were comparable to the price I had paid and the style that I wanted but were only 24” tall.  When my husband came home, we decided to put the other three stools together and just deal with them.  On Sunday morning, before church, my husband took the bar stools outside and proceeded to cut 5” off each leg to make us 24” bar stools.  While he was doing this, I cut little pieces of felt that went into each rubber protector.  Grinding, measuring, re-touching with paint…  Since church didn’t start until 10:45, and we had other projects we needed to do, we went to the store that same morning to find the exact same style of chair at 24” instead of 29” and 3 dollars less expensive.  Needless to say, the process was extremely frustrating, but the end result was the same. 

Do you ever take the longest possible route to find out where God has called you?  Have you ever avoided doing something because the work that will be involved in it or the circumstances that you are currently in?  I have, and ultimately, the end result usually is the same.  God calls me to do the same thing, over and over again, but when I don’t respond, he calls me a different way.  I ignore the calling and do everything to avoid it, and still I am being pushed in that direction.  It is like I am taking the hardest possible route to get somewhere that if I had just gone in the first place, I would have saved myself a lot of heartache.  

It made me think of Jonah.  He ignored God’s calling, went to try to go somewhere else and God made it so he couldn’t.  He took the hardest possible route to get to Nineveh.  He lived in the belly of a fish because he didn’t follow what he knew that God was calling Him to do.  I re-read Jonah again today.  What a great book!  

My encouragement for you today is if God is calling you to something, do it.  He will open doors where need be and close them where you don’t need to be.