Proverbs 20:24-25

The steps of a person are ordained by the Lord—
so how can anyone understand his own way?
It is a snare for a person to rashly cry, “Holy!”
and only afterward to consider what he has vowed.

There are times of life when things happen and it’s hard to understand why they happen. I’ll admit to you that it’s not always easy for me to stay positive and happy when something is going wrong in my life. I know that you aren’t like that. I know you are always able to maintain perspective. But, I just want you to know that sometimes I struggle with it.

And I’m glad to find out that I’m in good company. It seems that even Solomon wasn’t able to keep that perspective. In fact, I would say that Solomon is throwing it out there for us to hear this: God is the only one who can maintain that perspective. And the reason is, he is the one who has set aside the number of days for us to walk this earth.

And from where he sits, He can understand the way we are walking. He can understand how the things we have gone through, the things we are going through and the thing that we will go through in the future all play into the way he has ordained our steps. I think that over time, we start to see glimpses here and there of what God has planned for us all along, but it won’t be until Heaven that we will be able to look back and have a complete understanding of why we went through everything we went through.

Many of us experience this every day as we drive to work. For some of you, you have a great perspective on this. For others of us, we have to do it the old school way.

For those of you who live in “congested” areas, you have the pleasure of dealing with rush hour and commuter traffic. And it seems that most of the time, there is a problem on one of the roads you travel on the way to work. When those problems come, we hope to be warned about them beforehand by someone who’s been there and called it in, by the news-chopper flying overhead or by our GPS. The people who have GPS’s that give you up to the minute updates on traffic jams, I hope you understand just how cool that is. Because there are others of us who have to hope that the chopper go over our heads.

But what happens in those situations? There is an accident on the road, and because all the people coming behind them are driving on the same path, at the same altitude as the person who got into the accident, they find themselves stopped in the traffic jam that ensues because everyone else was doing the same thing. But for those who have GPS with traffic updates, you get a perspective of a satellite flying miles above your position combined with the news and other technology to help you find the best route.

The addition of something from a better perspective changes everything. If we rely on our own ability to get through the traffic jam, we’ll always find ourselves in the midst of one. So why not trust in the God who has planned the steps we should take in the first place? From his perspective, He can see the beginning, middle and ends of all our paths. And if we’ll let Him, He will guide us down the path of least resistance.

So, tomorrow morning, when you find yourself in a traffic jam, let it remind you that God wants to keep you from traffic jams in your own life. I guess you could call Him Traffic Jam Jesus. And He wants to help you avoid as many of them as possible.