The Death of Detours and the Road of Easter - Craig Lounsbrough
“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’”
– Isaiah 30:21
A detour that holds itself out as the road from which it deviated is a path to regret. Yet, it seems that we embrace such deceptions and spend more time on the detours of life than the road of life itself. Many of those detours lure us down their path with promises of ease and self-gratification that the road doesn’t offer us. In some instances we believed the detour to be a strategic shortcut that would position us ahead of the fools who decided to stick to the road. It may have been that the detour was easier to walk and more permissive in the walking. Perhaps it was the path of the gullible that appeared to be the path of the wise simply because so many were heading down it. However it happens, we walk them.
The Consequences of the Detours
Therefore, we betray our conscience and spend our lives fleeing from a regret that we can’t outrun. We make self-serving choices that we end up serving until the best of everything that we are is expended in the serving. The love that breathed life into a precious relationship is smothered to a death from which we cannot resuscitate it. Careers collapse in a heap of passion turned to ash with decades of sacrifice dissipating as smoke in an insensitive wind. We plummet into the cold abyss of isolation. Addictions take root. Hope becomes a myth. Depression a companion. Faith elusive.
Detours As the Necessity of Easter
Detours are paths to regret. Therefore, detours taken necessitated Easter happening. Easter is the answer to the fall-out of our foolish choices. It is the redemption of the detours that we should have never taken and it is the sole remedy to the irreversible consequences of taking just such journeys. Easter is regret hamstrung so that it can no longer give chase. It is liberation from serving our mistakes. It is relationships resuscitated. It is being thrust out of the abyss. It is ash and smoke becoming nothing more than the stuff of fires long extinguished so that we can light fresh fires that give life instead of kill it.
Easter does not change history. Rather, it transforms what history does to us and what the future can do for us. Easter is addictions ripped out at the roots, hope as reality, depression as foiled, and faith as a brilliant actuality. It is the incontestable reversal to everything that every detour ever did to us. It is the impact of our history reversed irreversibly. And if that weren’t enough, Easter is the empowerment to run the road of life at a pace so rigorous and joyous that detours become the hindrances that are stripped of their appeal. Easter is our worst mistakes turned to our greatest assets because of a God whose commitment to new beginnings was so immovable that He sent His Son to die so that we could have them.
Easter is our mistakes mercilessly slain. It is hope actuated by the fact that this man named Jesus was Himself mercilessly slain. Yet, He reversed His own murder by walking out of a tomb in a colossal reversal of everything that had defined mankind’s existence. Because of that historically defining reversal, nothing in the whole of this existence of ours is held hostage to that which it has been held hostage to. No detour is irreversible. No consequence is permanent.
This is Easter
Easter is Jesus’ walking down the detours of life, not as some gullible fool bent on some haphazard agenda as we had been. Rather, He walks as the rescuer of those who are lost in the morass of the detours that they have stumbled down. This Jesus’ brings us out, sets our feet squarely on the road, points ahead and says, “This is the way; walk in it.” And that first step is a radical yet entirely pure redefining of everything that our detours have done to us and what the future will now be for us. This is the glory, the majesty, and the privilege that Easter holds out to us. This is the road upon which detours die and consequences find no footing. This is the road of liberation and restoration. This is the road that was made for us and us for it. Easter is this road. So walk it, for you will find none better.
