“Necessary Detour”

Sometimes in life we find ourselves in situations that are not pleasant in any way. These "situations" arise in everyone's life and they tend to be the last place you would ever choose to go on your own; yet somehow we find ourselves in them anyway. I have grown to call these times in our lives "Necessary Detours". Of course our first thought is, how could this undesirable and unpleasant experience be necessary for my life?!

Once again, great revelation flows into my life through a movie or TV… My children are currently very interested in the "Cars" movie, thus I have seen it countless times. The gist of the movie being a race car who wants to be successful has some issues, maybe inexperience or immaturity. The race car finds himself on an unexpected and unplanned detour as he accidently gets released from his trailer and in his effort to find his way back ends up getting stuck in a little town where he does not want to be. Magically, by the time he gets to where he initially intended to go, to become that star race car, he has learned what he needed to learn and others that needed to learn from him have done the same.

Of course, I have seen this in my own life, and I am sure you have seen it in your life too or maybe you have yet to recognize it. With infertility all I could think is, "I just want to have a baby of my own", "why is this so hard for me?", "why do I need to go through this?", or "why does it have to be this way?... I am sure there are many reasons to these questions we ask when we are in the middle of a place we do not want to be. One reason I know of is because it is a necessary detour! There were people that I needed to meet and learn from, a faith in me that needed to grow, my marriage that was going to be strengthened by it and a motherhood waiting for me that was going to be more enjoyable than I had imagined. In addition to what I needed out of my necessary detour there were people who needed to meet me in the midst of my battle, people that needed to learn from me during and after my battle, people that I would not have met unless I was on this necessary detour!

This topic of big picture (last week's blog) and necessary detour have been on my heart for a while and continues to be something of an important revelation that I feel compelled to share. What "necessary detour" are you on or have you been on? What magic does God need to work in you and through you in the midst of and following your necessary detour? Maybe we need to begin to trust God differently when we are in our necessary detours!