Detour
You are going to arrive.
Dear one, still becoming.
God will use your own stubbornness to teach you. I have evidence.
I was going out recently, trying to get to a hotel in an area I knew well. And before you ask, why I was going to a hotel is absolutely none of your business. Moving on.
I knew the area. Had been there before, could picture the shape of it. That kind of familiarity makes you move like you have the full thing when you only have part of it.
I knew the area. I did not know where this hotel was.
So as I approached the junction closest to where I needed to be, something said to stop there. Quiet, simple. Drop here, cross, ask the bike men, they’ll direct you. The junction was right there.
But there was another junction ahead. Busier. And I told myself the bike men there would know the area even better.
I have a gift for convincing myself. I think you do too.
I passed the junction.
Got to the busier one, crossed over, asked the first bike man. He didn’t know. Asked another. He didn’t know. Someone told me to go back to the junction I had passed. I
I didn’t go back.
Then one man said he knew exactly where I was going. A whole Hausa man, full of confidence. Now if you know, you know. These ones will collect your money, carry you enter one chance, and when you reach somewhere that looks like where you described, they will park like they have delivered you. I should have known.
But the certainty in his voice was loud and the nudge I had ignored was quiet, so I climbed on.
We rode far. Far enough that my chest started registering what my mind hadn’t accepted. He took me to a place with a similar name. Not the place. We asked a man on the street who pointed us further in. Further in, there was nothing. I was asking strangers at this point. Nobody knew.
Then a woman standing nearby asked where I was going.
She didn’t know the hotel. But she said, the bike men at that first junction know every corner of this area. Go back. That’s where you should have gone from the beginning.
A stranger. At the wrong end of my detour. Sent me back to where I was supposed to have stopped.
I have been thinking about that. How the Spirit moves exactly like that sometimes. Just an ordinary moment, an ordinary person, and just enough to turn you around. No condemnation, no lecture. Simply: you know where you should have been. Go back.
We turned around. I spotted something that looked like the hotel, got off, it wasn’t it. Found another bike man. He said the hotel was right by that first junction, not even far from it. His price was almost nothing. We were there in minutes.
I stood in front of that hotel and did the calculation.
If I had stopped at the first junction when the thought came, I would have crossed, asked, and walked there. Five minutes. I would not have spent a thing.
But I spent. I wandered. And I got there anyway.
Here is what I want to say to you.
In the middle of that detour, I could have named myself. Lost. Confused. The kind of person who cannot find her way. Situations will do that, they will hand you a name and the chaos around you will make it feel accurate. But the situation is not your author. And the name it is offering you is not yours to keep.
Because here is what was also true in that detour: the destination did not move. The hotel was exactly where it was supposed to be. My wandering did not relocate it. And the one who knew every corner of that area was standing at a junction I had passed, the whole time.
Christ has factored in your detour.
Not just the detours that happened to you.
The ones you caused.
The junctions you overshot because your own reasoning felt more solid than the quiet thing inside you. The times you climbed on the back of confidence that didn’t know the way. He has accounted for all of it.
This is the oldest story there is. Ask Adam. Ask Eve. They didn’t just overshoot a junction, they broke the whole road. And Christ still came from their line.
He doesn’t mismanage what He authors. The itinerary of your life is held by someone who has never lost a person He was carrying.
You may feel like the timing is off, like you should be further along, like the detour has cost you too much. But you are going to arrive. Not in spite of Him, because of Him. Even when you are the variable, even when the fault is yours, He is not scrambling.
He factored you in. All of you.
So if today you are in the middle of something that is whispering a name over you, if the situation is trying to tell you who you are and where you are going to end up, I want you to remember: the one who holds the journey does not lose people.
He didn’t just factor in your detour.
He became the road back. He has been standing at that junction the whole time.
Still with you, still becoming,
Naomi🌹