A Brief Interlude

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

I overheard a coffeeshop conversation recently. The gist of the conversation was a couple new fathers talking about the difficulty of parenting. One of them commented on some expert or another "Nobody really knows - advice is just there to make insecure parents feel better. You're doing just fine."

I'm not a parenting expert (yet). But the conversation reminded me that we often aren't very good at foreseeing the consequences of our actions. We draw on our experiences, our successes, our failures, and we make our best guess. And it seems good. Or at least right. It's more (or less) worked for us in the past.

And yet somehow our brilliant path leads us to set defenses against people, or to pass on our weaknesses to our children, or to hurt the ones we love. Sometimes we see it and feel guilty, but don't feel like we have any choices. Sometimes we're just oblivious to it.

Perhaps I'm particularly about this path thing because it seems like God's been saying "no" much louder than I expected in a number of ways. The path is different, less comfortable, and away from what I wanted - or even expected. And I'm not very good at remembering that my way may be fundamentally flawed, despite my best efforts.