GOD’S DETOURS – 6 Reasons for God’s Course Corrections Намуна

2. God wants us to see and experience a life scenic view we would not have seen or chosen on our own initiative. We are living life on the freeway. Traveling 70 mph on four-lane roads, driving so fast we hardly have time to turn our heads and look out the window to steal a look at the countryside. We are focused on just getting there—wherever that is. And once we get there we get back on the interstate and do it all over again. We observe little and learn less. We only see the landscape around us from the vantage point of carefully and colorlessly planned freeway rest stops.

Jesus took a detour in John 4 when traveling to Galilee from Jerusalem. The cultural freeway to get from Judea to Galilee was via the Jordan River interstate. To get there through Samaria was slow, dangerous, and politically incorrect. But John says that, “Jesus had to go through Samaria.” After reading the rest of the story we know the reason he took this off road route was to encounter an outcast lady in an out of the way city, giving his disciples (then and now) a countercultural view from the side of the freeway.

Detours cause us to slow down and look around. Detours, when we can get over our impatience, can open up vistas that we would never see from the freeway. We will often meet people who are lost, in pain, and lonely. People we would never encounter along our freeway. Along the detour we discover the hand of God in the beauty of nature’s simplicity or experience the kindness of a friend that showed up unexpected and unannounced.