First Baptist Church of Herndon

The Crosswalks of Life

Linda Soller | Jul 20, 2015

About one hundred yards beyond my office building is a heavily used hiking/biking trail. Where the trail meets the busy road there’s a crosswalk. Despite everyone knowing about the crosswalk, there continue to be accidents. Fortunately more people pass safely across the walk than the number who are somehow involved in an accident. The other day I walked toward the trail. I was heading to the café in the building next to mine to grab some lunch. There were no people on the crosswalk. A car passed by at a good moderate speed, then I saw it. A deer was walking carefully across the crosswalk. It had waited for the car to pass. The deer stayed in the center of the walk until reaching the other side, then scampered off in to the brush to the left of the path. The deer seemed to know just what to do to safely cross the road.

How often in life are we given opportunities to take a safer path, but turn away?  It probably happens more often when we are younger because we feel invincible, or close to it. Sometimes we pay the price and look back on unwise decisions and wonder how we were ever so foolish. Fortunately we often squeak by, no worse for wear as they say. Unfortunately we may pay the price for a long time, or someone else may pay the price for our actions. Earlier this summer the news told of a young mother who could not swim. She took her five children who were not swimmers to the pool. They began in the shallow end, but as she played with the toddlers the three older children wondered to the deep end of the pool. All three drowned. What an incredible tragedy. We can only imagine what went through the mother’s mind when she decided to take them to the pool and again after the tragic accident.  

When we read such stories it would be easy to find fault. We humans are masters at finding someone to blame. Perhaps we should focus instead on the crosswalks in life. Maybe we should focus more on preventing accidents and less on pointing fingers. God knows we will sin. He has provided crosswalks all over the place to help us. We have His love and support, we can pray for guidance, we have commandments, we have Bible stories to illustrate what to do and not to do, and wonderful music to inspire us to do the right thing. We have churches, and in those churches we have church families willing to lend a hand. What we sometimes forget is that He gave us freedom of thought. He allows us to decide which path we will take. He puts those crosswalks in front of us, but leaves it to us to decide if we’ll use them. The other day I observed one of God’s creatures, a deer, use a crosswalk to safely continue his life journey. There are crosswalks all along your life path, the question is, will you use them?

Have a great week! :o)  Linda