Every Alabama schoolchild has either read or heard Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken.” Most recall the opening line, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” But even those who do not recall it remember the story of the traveler being forced to choose between the two paths and choosing the one less traveled.
The poem is famous, in part, because it describes an episode with which all of us can identify. All of us have stood at a fork in the road and been forced to choose between attractive options.
Sometimes the choices were life-changing. Whom should I date? What school should I attend? What job should I take? What church should I join? What treatment for my disease should I choose? We understood their seriousness and treated them accordingly.
Sometimes the choices seemed as insignificant as deciding whether to have a dessert at the end of a meal. On this side of those choices, we know that none is really insignificant. Eat too many desserts, for example, and one’s waistline shows it. Even one’s overall health can be impaired.
Still decisions have to be made. Like Frost’s traveler, one has to choose one road over the other or spend life paralyzed in indecision and inaction. Unfortunately even a decision to do nothing is a decision fraught with its own consequences but that is another matter.
Frost wrote of the traveler, “[L]ong I stood and looked down one as far as I could.” One can almost picture the traveler evaluating the paths before him — their beauty, their direction, their structure.
Like us, the traveler struggled to discern what it would be like to walk each of the trails. We would all like to know the outcomes of our choices. Will the dessert taste as good as it looks? Will the job be good for me? Will I be good for the job? But the traveler could only see “[t]o where it (the road) bent in the undergrowth.”
How frustrating! All of our study, all of our evaluation, all of our praying still leave one with limited understanding.
The only way the traveler in the yellow wood would know what each road was like was to travel each road.
A pastor friend from days past used to share how he gave up the opportunity to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court in order to follow God’s leadership into the pastorate. The story behind the testimony was that the pastor left law school in order to enter seminary. But in his mind, the pastor believed that his “road not taken” would have led him to be one of the nation’s leading jurists.
One may chuckle at the story and consider such an outcome highly unlikely. I certainly do. But the truth is that the consequences of our choices are only fully known after we have made them and after we have walked our chosen road.
Frost wrote in his poem, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” The traveler knew that no matter how much he desired to walk both roads, it could not happen. Once my pastor friend chose seminary, he was set on a way that led to other ways for the rest of his life.
Even had he gone back to law school in midlife, he would not have been the same person or had the same experience or enjoyed the same opportunities that were before him right out of college. Time, circumstances and experiences would have changed him as well as altered his “road not taken.” The same is true of us all.
In the poem’s final stanza, the traveler said, “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.”
One can sense a forlorn spirit in the words. A sigh, a sadness, a “what if,” a regret.
It is odd how the human spirit returns to some of life’s forks in the road and asks the “what if” question. For those who have walked through crisis, perhaps it is understandable. Pain and grief and loss and confusion cause one to recall critical moments, searching for ways the outcomes could have been different.
Yet there is no way of knowing what the outcomes of different choices might have been. We can delude ourselves as much in playing the “what if” game as my pastor friend who viewed himself sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Possible but highly unlikely.
In the end, the “what if” game is a dead end. It claims all our energy and resources and leaves us in a fantasy world of make believe.
Better to follow the example of the traveler and simply acknowledge that the choice made when standing at the fork in the road “made all the difference.”
As a Christian, we must remember that no matter the results of our choices, God is with us. God’s Word assures the one who believes in Him through faith in Jesus Christ that “in all things God works for the good of those who love Him” (Rom. 8:28).
God does not say He is with us as long as we make right choices or choose right roads. Rather God says, “I am with you always” (Matt. 28:20).
The apostle Paul asked, “What can separate us from the love of God?”
Answering his own question, Paul wrote, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, nor any other created things, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).
God is with us as we stand at the fork in the road. God is with us as we choose which road to follow. And God is with us as we walk that road no matter where it leads. Praise be to God.
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