'God doesn't take Detours'

When Paul stood in that synagogue in Pisidian Antioch and walked his audience through the story of Israel — from Abraham through Moses to David — he wasn’t giving a history lesson. He was making an argument. And the hinge of the argument was a single word. He said God had brought the Savior Jesus from David’s descendants as he promised. Not as a surprise. Not as a change of direction. As a fulfillment of something that had been in motion since the first page. Every covenant added tension and expectation. The Israelites faced significant challenges and difficulties which stirred a longing for God to rescue them. Every covenant pointed forward to an ultimate rescue. Every chapter said, in its own way: something is coming. Keep reading. And now, Paul told them, the something had arrived.

I spent a year in Mexico City in college, convinced I was headed toward missionary work. I stayed with a Mexican family, studied Spanish at UNAM, helped with evangelism in a local church. By the time I came home, my Spanish was still poor, I’d spent more time ministering to Americans than Mexicans, and the year felt like a wrong turn — a detour from wherever God was actually taking me. But further down the road I could see what that chapter was doing. It wasn’t rerouting me. It was clarifying me, sharpening my understanding of what specifically I was called to and what I wasn’t. I learned other valuable lessons about ministry that had nothing to do with Spanish or missions in Mexico. The Author was writing something I couldn’t read yet because I was still in the middle of it.

Most of us have a chapter like that. A door that closed when we were certain it should have opened. A year that went sideways. A plan that collapsed without explanation. From inside it the story looked broken. But the God who fulfilled every promise He ever made, on schedule and in the fullness of time, is the same God writing your story now. He doesn’t reroute when the road gets hard. He was always going this way.

God doesn’t take detours. He leads with purpose.

Is there a chapter in your story you’ve written off as wasted time? What might the Author have been doing in it that you couldn’t see from inside it?

Blessings,

Jonathan