When we are not on the path that God intends for our lives, we know it. We may not be consciously aware of it, but we feel it in our hearts. Not being on the path can be very frightening. When we are off the path that God intends for our lives, we lose our hope, our faith, and our peace. We struggle with the ordinary, daily aspects of our lives. Everything seems like a struggle. The hopelessness is suffocating, and all we can focus on is the moment that we are in. We can no longer look to the future, for if we do all we can see is darkness and the next great struggle. We find ourselves waiting for the next fire to erupt, and we spend all of our time trying to extinguish that fire, often in vain. When we are off the path, we have to let go of the dreams and goals to which we once had clung. We realize that those dreams will never come true, and that makes the hopelessness even denser. Then the day comes when God says, “Enough.” He has watched us struggle and fight, and He knows that we need His help to get back on the right path.

Getting back on the path is often a difficult and painful process. We often have a lot of corrections that we need to make, but we realize that we have to follow Him, we have to obey Him, and we have to trust Him. When we return to the path, peace and hope are not restored to us instantly. Like I said before, we have to make amends for the mistakes we made while we were off the path, but if we continue to follow God and trust Him, the clouds will start to lift. It may seem like this is a slow process, but each second, minute, day, or week that goes by makes the clouds lift even more, and when we look back on where we once were, we realize just how much progress we have made through God’s help.

Very soon, everything starts to come into focus. We awake each day with a renewed sense of peace. Our hope has been restored, strained relationships have been renewed, our purpose has become clearer, and we have peace. Then the most beautiful thing in the world begins to happen. The dreams and goal we once had and were forced to abandon begin to come back to us. God hands them back to us like a gift. The presentation of this wonderful gift gives us even more hope and peace, and it makes us want to follow Him even more. Once we are back on the right path, everything seems lighter. Now when we look to the future we can see light instead of darkness. We can actually breathe again, things seem easier, and we know that all of our dreams can come true. We actually have the hope and strength to make them come true, sometimes for the first time in our lives.

You see, God wants to give us the desires of our hearts, and when we follow Him and trust Him He hands them to us, and we feel like a child on Christmas morning, and everything seems possible once again. We have a renewed sense of peace, and PEACE MATTERS.

~Dan~