The Narrow Path
In Junior High School gym class, I had to walk a balance beam. I’m not the most graceful person and am not comfortable with heights. The teacher lowered the beam to only six inches off the floor. I still could not do it. I tried. Repeatedly. Then the teacher walked ahead of me on the beam, instructed me to keep my eyes on her, and try one last time. I kept my eyes on her back and put one step in front of the other. Miraculously, I made it across the entire beam.
This came to mind when Kyle was preaching on walking the narrow path with Jesus. He was talking about grief: one side of the narrow path was where you could be stuck in grief and the other side was where you denied your grief. Walking the narrow path between the two, with Jesus, was the way for Jesus to befriend us in our grief and lead us out of it.
Of course, it could be anything on either side of the narrow path: grief, anger, pride, or a particular sin. On one side we are denying it. Oh, that sin isn’t so bad. Is it really a sin? But my anger is justified. Or we get stuck in it and live our lives with the underlying emotion or sin engulfing us.
Sounds easy enough to just keep our eyes on Jesus and navigate the narrow path with Him. But we have such fickle eyes. We see the things on the side of the road. The things that the enemy makes so appealing and justified. We take a sidestep toward the edge of that narrow path. We get a little more rebellious and take more steps. And then, we are in the ditch. Either stuck in the quagmire or denying that we are even in the ditch. Sound familiar?
Our Father understands our humanity and makes it so easy to return to Him. We just have to put our eyes again on Jesus and get on the narrow path again. At Regen we call that a Kairos moment and we go through the circle of repent and believe. The terminology doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we get our eyes back on Jesus and keep them there!
-Terri
Terri Venetta lives in Johnston where she enjoys gardening, canning, antiques, watercolors, wool rug hooking, reading and, most of all, her grandchildren
