Life and Love

Do you ever feel like you’re at a fork in your road of life and so fearful of picking the wrong path that you choose to stay straight?

I believe it’s the salad fork that has three prongs. While I’ve never understood the logic in the different prongs on forks, for this particular analogy I’m gonna choose the three pronged fork.

Suppose each individual prong is guiding you into different demential places of your life. For me, one prong continues on the path I’m on right now. I continue to follow it daily and do what is expected of me. Sure I’m happy on this path, because it makes everyone happy around me, but it’s kinda boring. That’s the middle prong. There’s no curves, it’s the strongest supported prong of the three, but it is very straight forward. Then there’s the option to choose the right prong. In the right direction, there’s a little bit of a curve but I’d be goin down a path that God has for me, which is ever changing and rarely seems to make sense to the humanist parts in me yet gets me excited about living. Then there’s a third prong that curves toward the left. Now that’s the prong that would definitely be most confusing to me. Following down the left prong would lead me in a direction that would destroy the very part of me that God wants to use. It would cause me to begin tearing apart at the seams little by little. I would eventually be led away from everything that I know and love. All of the “familiar” in life would be lost. Sure it’d be fun and adventurous for a time but eventually I’d get lonely and have regret. None of those attributes comes from God so I have no desire for that path. So in my fork in life there’s the one path that I know for sure I don’t ever wanna go down.

Now I’m left with only two prongs to choose from. There’s the path I’m on in the middle that is the most stable and less terrifying because I know what to expect on it and it’s comfortable. Then there’s the scary path for me. The one that I know I’m called to be on but am terrified to choose because of the fear of the unknown and I don’t know hows. I feel like I’d have no sense of direction but it’s the path of obedience and the one I should be on, even at the risk of failure.

While I do love change and challenges in life, the scariest change for me is the fear of losing those that I love and feeling like a failure all over again. In that fear, it keeps me on the path of least resistance. It also causes me to miss out on so many blessings that God has for me. I know He has blessings awaiting me because He has shown them to me. What I don’t know is how to let go and let God work His magic. How do I follow a path that I fear of messing up on? I don’t wanna let God down again. I don’t wanna fail with something He’s entrusted me with again.

How do I trust God more than I doubt myself? I allow myself to cause such self doubt that it has me paralyzed. Having such doubt and absolutely no confidence in myself of choosing the “right thing” from God, and knowing how to do what He’s requesting of me, that is keeping me on the middle prong in my own fork in the road.