I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~ From, The Road Less Traveled, by Robert Frost
For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” But you were unwilling, and you said, “No! We will flee upon horses”; therefore you shall flee away; and, “We will ride upon swift steeds”; therefore your pursuers shall be swift. A thousand shall flee at the threat of one; at the threat of five you shall flee, till you are left like a flagstaff on the top of a mountain, like a signal on a hill. Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore He exalts Himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him. For a people shall dwell in Zion, in Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as He hears it, He answers you. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide Himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. Then you will defile your carved idols overlaid with silver and your gold-plated metal images. You will scatter them as unclean things. You will say to them, “Be gone!” And He will give rain for the seed with which you sow the ground, and bread, the produce of the ground, which will be rich and plenteous. In that day your livestock will graze in large pastures, and the oxen and the donkeys that work the ground will eat seasoned fodder, which has been winnowed with shovel and fork. And on every lofty mountain and every high hill there will be brooks running with water, in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. Moreover, the light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day when the LORD binds up the brokenness of his people, and heals the wounds inflicted by his blow.
~ from Isaiah 30
Oh beloved, it is true.
There will be days where the very act of trying to live in obedience, will back us into a corner. And the choices of others (often irresponsible) will put us into a place where we can smell the gunpowder in the barrel of the gun being placed against our forehead.
It feels like we have no choice.
However, the reality is that nothing has changed. We are free as a bird. The only thing that has changed is our feelings about the issue. When we get backed into a corner, our sense of what needs to happen gets accelerated. As we are pressed, we feel the heat created by the pressure and we begin to squirm.
The truth is, though, the faster we move, the worse our problems will be.
Can we see it?
There is a truth that is true in nearly every discipline of life: Go slow to go fast. Do something. But, before you do it, stop altogether. Wait. Listen. And then, wait some more.
Now, the waiting may be nothing more than a few seconds, but waiting has nothing to do with time. Waiting is a state of being. Waiting is the opposite of getting overheated in the pressure. Waiting is disengaging my willingness to panic, and engaging whatever faith and trust I can apply to His incredible faithfulness.
However, when we stop trying to run the show in our tiny little timeslot; when we enter the state where ‘when’ is no longer really that relevant – it is then that we can take in information from the One Who is already standing at the outcome of our conundrum.
So, are you feeling cornered by some situation? Right now, now, this very moment is the moment to stop seeing the situation from your own (and this fool of a writer’s) willingness to panic. Right now, now, this very moment is to come to a standstill in our spirit and let The Holy Spirit tell us which path to take.
He will.
Some people by the word freedom understand the ability to do whatever one wants … People who have the more allowed themselves to come into slavery to sins, passions, and defilements more often than others appear as zealots of external freedom, wanting to broaden the laws as much as possible. But such a man uses external freedom only to more severely burden himself with inner slavery. True freedom is the active ability of a man who is not enslaved to sin, who is not pricked by a condemning conscience, to choose the better in the light of God’s truth, and to bring it into actuality with the help of the gracious power of God. This is the freedom of which neither heaven nor earth are restrict.
~St. Philaret of Moscow
