Detour = a long or roundabout route taken to avoid something
or to visit somewhere along the way. (Source: Google)
One afternoon, my sister received this text from one of her best friends:
“So this morning Laura and I went to start our journey to New York, and I accidentally picked the wrong way on the GPS because Laura hadn’t told me which one to pick so that we would not go through Canada. We didn’t realize we were going the wrong way for an hour until we were about to cross over the border and then had to turn around and come back the way we came, adding 2 hours onto our trip. It was discouraging but we both felt like the Lord was protecting us from something and there was a reason why we took the wrong way.
We just are now going the way we should have gone and just passed a bunch of fire signals on the highway and what looked to be the remnant of a huge accident that had happened on the highway.
There is no way to know whether we would have been passing by originally when that accident happened, but I feel like we were saved from something that could have been really bad.”
She was driving home from college with a friend, and they accidentally selected the wrong route on their GPS. After they realized their error – an hour after driving the wrong direction – they turned around and started to go the right way. When they got back onto the correct route, they passed what appeared to be the remnant of a big car pileup that had occurred not too long ago.
Is it possible they could have been in the car pileup, had they not accidentally driven the wrong way?
I believe there are moments in life when the Lord protects us from danger – what I call, “divine detours.” These are moments in life when our plans are delayed or changed in order to protect us from something hazardous.
Sometimes, divine detours are apparent, like when my sister’s friend was on her road trip. But there are also times when divine detours are not apparent, and we are unaware of how the Lord protected us. As my pastor Jon once said, “Often times, we’re protected from things that we don’t even know.”
I remember one evening when my wife and I went to the mall. After shopping for a little bit, we returned to our car to find one of our tires flat.
I was super frustrated, and I didn’t know why it happened. But once I cooled down, I remember wondering if God had detoured us. Maybe there was something dangerous we were supposed to avoid, and the flat tire was our divine detour?
Next time something goes unexpected or unplanned – such as your car getting a flat tire – think of it as a divine detour. The Lord may very well be “detouring” you from something worse.
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