A Prayer When Seeking Direction at Life's Crossroads
By Ashley Moore
Bible Reading
The LORD says, “I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and watch over you. - Psalm 32:8, NLT
Listen or Read Below:
I love growing Zinnias in our yard every summer. The flowers boast vibrant colors, texture variation, stem strength, and they can be cut repeatedly only to return with more brilliant blooms than before. Just this morning, I had to cut back several branching stems that had grown so dense the entire plant toppled to the ground. Cutting away perfectly useful and glorious flowers simply due to overcrowding reminded me of what it feels like to be faced with important decisions and an abundance of options.
Can you relate to the frustration of having too many choices but struggling to know which direction to take? Perhaps you juggle the roles of mother, manager, and most-involved parent in the PTO. Yet, you feel the weight of one more responsibility may make you collapse under the pressure. You wonder if it’s time to let something go or ask for help. Or you could wrestle with something much more complex, like whether you have outgrown an important relationship with someone. This person's behaviors harm your growth, and you consider whether the time has arrived to snip your ties to them. Leaving the relationship scares you as you think of the pain this may cause each of you.
Whether your crossroad decision pertains to something simple, like the day’s agenda, or something weightier, like how best to educate your children, we need help sorting through all the options to find the best path for our lives.
I love the reminder from our key verse about how God responds to us as we stand at our crossroads, wondering what to do. God, the perfect gardener, carefully tends and attunes to the details of our lives. He watches over His tender fledgling plants, adding nutrients and water to produce in us, strong roots and firm branches. God holds His pruning shears in hand where necessary, guiding and advising us on what needs to go so that we can flourish and bloom. He places supportive structures around us and puts us near other plants that complement our strengths and gird up our weaknesses. He guides us along the best pathways that promote the purposes He decided for us long before we ever emerged from the soil's surface.
I know how attentive and careful I am with the flowers in my garden. I find myself weeding despite the heat and my fatigue, buying and installing netting to protect my precious plant babies from the deer and other garden predators, and watering multiple times if it hasn’t rained often enough. I weigh every decision through the question: Does this serve the ultimate good of my garden? Yet, I am only a human with a fondness for flowers. How much more does our Heavenly Father care about helping us make decisions for the ultimate good of our lives? Thank God He guides, advises, and watches over us because He loves watching His garden flourish, too!
Let’s Pray:
Dear Lord,
Thank you for the reminders from creation and your Word about how you care for us. As much as I love my garden, this pales compared to how you feel towards us. Thank you for caring about the big and small decisions that weigh us down and threaten to destroy our future. Thank you for cutting away the parts of us that do not serve your purposes for our lives, despite how painful it may feel in the moment. Please continue to pour out your wisdom on the best ways to spend our time and which pathways prove best for our particular situations. Thank you for guiding us to environments where we gain additional strength from structures like a local church or the wise counsel of a therapist, support group, or dear companion. When we feel panicky about what to do, Lord, remind us of how you watch over us and advise without end. Thank you that we can come to you and get the much-needed direction we seek for the many crossroads of our lives.
We pray all these things in your name, Jesus, amen.
Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Bulat Silvia
Editor's Note: We're proud to announce we've just launched a new nighttime companion to Your Daily Prayer: the Your Nightly Prayer devotional. You'll soon be able to subscribe to receive Your Nightly Prayer via email, or as a podcast, but for now you can find it on the website at crosswalk.com/devotionals/your-nightly-prayer. We hope it's a relaxing and soothing way to wind down your day with rich meditations on who God is.
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