Cracked Sidewalks
If the walk of life is a sidewalk, or a road, or a path by which everyone travels, then I’d like to imagine that means my walk is the low-budget county sidewalk — repressed, cracked, uneven, and completely different every few blocks.
Every step you take is a different height, even though you mount no hills nor descend any slopes. Sometimes you step forward, and your step is higher; other times, your body sinks with your next step.
The roots of trees mounting under the road in front of you push the sidewalk up and splinter it under pressure of growth, the passage of time which the road you take cannot withhold. It does not grow with you, so you must move forward. You relate more to the trees in your wake than you do the ground in front of you.
So why do you fret, my dear child, about the next step you shall take? Do you not trust your feet to hold steady, or the path to be ever-present in front of you?
It is not the next step you fear, rather what may crack the path along your way. Streetlamps have no effect on sight in the shade of a tree; you fear only because you cannot see.
But I tell you with certainty, nothing around you will ever remain unaffected by the passing seasons and storms. The leaves will blow off the trees and coat the ground; snow will come soon after. Then everything will bloom again. The faithfulness of the sun and the trees remains; what do you have to fear? You are surrounded by love and trees, and you shall never be alone no matter how you feel.
Have faith, my child. You are not at the end yet. Every season seems eternal in its midst, every storm more brutal by the minute; but just like the passing of things on the sidewalk, your trouble, your fear, even your dismay is temporal. Hope is never lost in the midst of storms — it is only harder to see.
The truth is, we think we know where we are going sometimes. Life is working itself out at the moment, and we feel like we know exactly what God has in store for us. You got a career field, a goal, a group of friends…you get swept away in the vision you create of a perfect life for yourself.
But as we know all too well, life is not like that newly paved street. It is that cracked sidewalk, and sometimes we get tripped up by it. Things don’t quite work out. We lose faith because we feel like God is dropping the backing he put on us as an investor — we know, we wouldn’t be a worthy investment.
But hear me out: promises have been made to you, my beloved, by King Jesus — not the promises made by human lips or action or thought that are as the wind; just as invisible. These are the promises of eternity and inheritance, of happiness right where you are, an achievement of all you strive to see come to pass, a unity weaving you into the mural of cosmic beauty.
The truth is, the abstract thought played out here is only a faint imprint of the whisper in your heart, telling you where you have felt discouraged. This is here to give you courage, and to help that still, small voice inside you, that knows you have the strength in you to press on and to overcome your battles; to rise up in you, start a rebellion, and burn all the oppression of self that you have fallen into. Make an inferno of all the ugly deprivation of happiness because it’s just not true.
You do have it in you. Never, ever think that the cracks in front of you are the whole road.
