Diversion

Image result for diversion signIts that time again when the council is nearing the end of its financial year and all of a sudden everywhere you go the roads are getting fixed.  Coming home from Lisburn yesterday I ended up getting diverted down a road I had never been down before.  It brought me out at a junction I cross most days, but going east west, not north south.  I have often wondered where the north south road went - and yesterday I found out!   It struck me that I have lived here for twenty years and there are still un-travelled roads to discover.


I wonder if this virus is going to end up being a bit of a diversion which God will use to take us down a road less travelled.  We will end up at the same point we would have ended up at had the virus not happened.  But we might well discover new things as we follow the diversion signs which say things like ' self isolate' ' home school'  ' work from home'  ' tighten the belt'  ' adjust behaviour'

The good thing about the Christian life is that no matter how long you have been living it there are still so many more things to discover.  You can read the same scripture every day for a decade and see something new in it each time.  You can think you know how God is going to respond in a given situation and discover that He has something entirely different in mind 😀  It's what makes the Christianity lark such fun and a little bit dangerous.   None of us could have anticipated six months ago that 2020 was going to be the year when the world closed down and the church in the West could not meet on a Sunday.   We were all happily driving along the well known roads we have driven down for years, and all of a sudden there has been a massive diversion.  We have had to trust in governments signposting us to go another way.   We don't know quite where we will end up.  Some of us don't know if we have enough fuel to go this way.  Many will be worried that we will miss the event we were supposed to be attending.  The diversion takes more fuel and more time that we had planned for.
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And the other thing about diversions is that so often they seem to take us in the opposite direction from the way we were heading.  Im sure many if not most of us are looking at Covid 19 as a backwards step - a roadblock - an annoying ( and possibly deadly) distraction from our mission.  But the thing that strikes me as I think about the road metaphor is that the diversion is only in place because someone is fixing the road.    Maybe, just maybe, God is working on the road ahead.  Not necessarily for us individually but for the church universal.   Perhaps He is doing what He says He will do in Isaiah.   Making the rough places smooth and levelling out the bumps.   If God has closed the road ahead for a while then His reasons will be only good.  In the meantime the whole church, all together, all over the world, finds itself on the same diversion.  We are united.  We are experiencing the same thing - all of us, everywhere.   The church in the West is about to experience what the church in other places has been experiencing for a long time already.  Inability to assemble.  Worship behind closed doors.  We in the West are about the experience to some degree the measure of hardship, inconvenience and stress that church in the under-developed world experiences on a daily basis.   This diversion is going to be a great unifier and leveller.  God is smart.  He has an end destination in mind.   Because if Protestant and Catholic, Baptist and Bretheren, Charismatic and Lutheran , North and South, male and female, rich and poor can come through this together, in unity, setting aside our differences in favour of seeing the bigger picture, then the world will be transformed as the Church rises up to be the hands and voice of Jesus like never before.
Image result for every valley shall be exalted

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