It's Okay Now

She looked at me and said, “I just need to stay in my lane.”  The moment she said those words, my world kind of had that slow motion movement to it as the words slowly reverberated in my head. “Stay in my lane.”  What does that even mean?

“Staying in My Lane“

There is a place in some of us that holds a hard wired desire to make a difference in the massive problems of justice across the world. Whether it’s the AIDS epidemic, the need for clean water, or the evils of the modern day slave trade, there is certainly no lack for problems.  My friend that said this to me is a lawyer. She’s one of those people that sees the big issue of human trafficking and is working on the legal portion and determining what specific role she is to play.  She was talking about how she has to focus on legal only because that’s what she’s good at… that was her lane. She was most effective there.

What the Old Poet Had to Say

Every time I think of what she said that day, I remember the stanzas of Robert Frost.  He wrote my favorite poem of all time, The Road Not Taken.  The stanza that echos in my head  is this:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We all choose a road. Some choose the roads that are less traveled and some choose the roads that many travel. Neither are wrong.  I think when it comes to issues of justice, we just need to make sure we take “our road”.  Whatever road we feel God has put us on. We need to walk that road until it ends. Because in order for God’s awesome strategy to unfold, His strategy that ends in the redemption of his people, we need to simply do what we’ve been called to do.  We need to stay in our lane.

It’s all His work. So let’s just do what we’re good at. Let’s do what we’ve been called to do. Let’s do it well. Let’s do it with passion. Let’s do it with Love. That’s what people need. That’s what God needs. He needs us in our lane. He needs us on our path.  And his strategy of redemption will unfold the way He’s planned.

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