Detours
I remember learning how to drive. For some reason, the most difficult part of that experience for me, was learning how to turn into a road. My driving teacher would always remark, “You’re not driving a bus! Stop turning into the middle of the road!” Needless to say, making detours was not fun at all. Until recently, my sentiments about detours were not exclusive to driving. They applied to life as well.
Don’t worry. I’m not crazy, there are detours in life. They are those things we would normally call challenges. The thing is, many times what we hit are not stumbling blocks, but T- junctions. Like a car driving straight ahead on meeting a T-junction, we are only likely to meet distraction if we fail to take the appropriate detours on meeting a “challenge”.
The thing is, many times what we hit are not stumbling blocks, but T- junctions.
Take my life for example (may not mean much now, but give me a few years and you just might be begging for an autograph [lol]). I hit a T-junction right after completing secondary school. I was bent on being a lawyer when I was a teenager. It was so important to me that after graduating from secondary school, I did an internship at a law firm for three months, even though I hadn’t yet gotten admission into law school. I’m sure you can guess what happened. I didn’t get into law school. Crashed doesn’t begin to explain how I felt.
One day I stared at the ceiling of my lonely room and in a bid to query the big man up there, I asked, “Well what else do you expect me to do now? “ Eventually, I got a knack of which direction to turn in. It was the detour to Ashesi. At the time I had no idea where my life was headed but I look back now and realize that all God was doing was putting me on a detour towards achieving major things in my life. Here at Ashesi, I’ve held major leadership positions that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to even stand for anywhere else, have participated in programs that aren’t available anywhere else and have achieved feats that would not have been possible in any other school.
Don’t get the wrong message, this is not an ad for Ashesi. All I’m saying is that anytime you meet a difficult situation, don’t limit yourself to looking straight ahead. Take a glance to your left and right, and you may just find that what you have before you is a grand opportunity to take a detour that will lead you closer to fulfilling your destiny.
#Week 4
