DANG, that's not the path I wanted to take!

I've been doing a lot of driving lately. Lots of driving. Probably not the best time to be driving with the price of gas, but that's the way it goes. And when I'm driving, I have the opportunity to think and observe. I kind of connect the world with how it affects my daily life or other people's daily lives. I use the program “Waze” a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's just a little program you can punch in where you're going and it will give you the best route. It may change routes in the middle when there's a wreck or bad traffic. You may get directed to a different path.

So why am I bringing Waze up? What does that have to do with life? What does that have to do with anything? As we are doing life, lots of us have this specific roadmap that we're following. And we follow it and we follow it and nothing ever changes. We follow it and we may end up where we wanted to be, or we might not.

But what if we had a program, an app like Waze, for our life that would say, "Okay, you're coming up to a bump. Take this route instead of that one." Or, "That thing that you're working on now is going to flop if you don't do this instead of what you'd planned." Many of us get stuck in how we think things are supposed to be. We get stuck in how we think it's supposed to look. We get stuck in how we think we're supposed to get to where we want to get.

And if our lives were like Waze, or if our thoughts were like Waze, we would be really open to changing directions whenever we needed to. It's a really cool thing though, with Waze if the traffic's starting to slow down, it will give you a message. Or say there's a policeman ahead, you get that little tidbit as well. Or perhaps there's a wreck coming up, it gives you that information as well. And will shoot you in a different direction. So I'm going to start adding a Waze app to my life so I don’t have to follow the roadmap.

The destination is the same, but getting there may be different. How it looks to get there may be different. Oh, for some people that's really, really difficult because they made a plan. They have to follow the plan. They have to do what it says. No matter what, this is what they are going to do.

And what if we didn't have to do that? What if we could trust that all the detours, rerouting, and going around obstacles were going to lead us to where we wanted to end up. What if we end up with our destination looks different than what we were expecting but we still reached our goal?

Life is like Waze. Be prepared for the trip that you may be taking and know being open to having it look a little different is so important to how we view the outcome. Our idea that it must look one way can cause us to be disappointed. When we are open to the journey, no matter where the left turns and right turns take us, we can live a life that is serene and joyful.