Daily Devotional
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death."
Proverbs 14:12
Here is the strange mercy of this passage: the easy road only looks easy. It gets harder the longer you stay on it. Sleep in every morning long enough and you end up poor. Eat whatever looks good long enough and your health fails. Keep only the promises that are convenient and one day you look up and discover that nobody trusts your word. The wide road charges its bill at the end, and it never shows you the invoice up front. It is living on a credit card and telling yourself you will get to it eventually.
Scripture describes an entire nation living that way in one grim sentence. In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. No authority higher than the self. That is the wide road, and if we are honest, part of every one of us finds it attractive.
But God made us to rule and to subdue, and he put in us an appetite for the hard thing done well. Something inside you was not built to drift. It was built to climb. This may be part of why a generation with more leisure than any before it is also more anxious and more depressed. We built easy lives and some part of the brain knows this is not what we were made for.
And the hard road is the true road. Aristotle said all men by nature desire to know. T. S. Eliot said humankind cannot bear very much reality. Both are right about us. We hide from uncomfortable truths, and at the same time we are relieved when we finally see things as they actually are. You were not made to spend your one life on a comfortable lie.
Today's Challenge
Where are you running a balance right now, enjoying the ease and postponing the bill? What is one hard, good thing you have been avoiding because you were built to climb and chose to coast?
Prayer
Lord, I have been charging things to a card I cannot pay. I have called laziness rest and avoidance peace, and I have let small compromises pile up where no one can see them. Show me the real total. Give me the courage to face reality instead of hiding from it, and put the appetite back in me for the hard thing done well. Amen.
