Tip: Sometimes we must take a detour before we can get to our destination!
Tip of the Week
02/18/13
Tip: Sometimes we must take a detour before we can reach our destination!
Have you ever been on a trip and suddenly seen a detour sign ahead of you? Perhaps it was placed there because of an accident or road construction. In any case, your journey was about to turn in a different direction. Having to go in a different direction may have been upsetting to you; especially if you were in a hurry or if you were trying to reach your destination to meet a deadline. But, detours in traffic, and in life, are a fact that no one can deny.
As I look back on my own personal journey, I am amazed at some of the detours I have taken that have led me to where I am today. I started my aspirations to success as an assistant paperboy. A few years later I got a job as a life-guard. Next I was a construction worker and then later became a delivery driver for the company for which I worked. I eventually became a full-time student and after college, the youth director of a church. After that, I was a school teacher and then a school principal. My life took another turn and I became an associate pastor and later became a pastor. Then I moved into the world of speaking and became a motivational speaker. And finally I reached my current destination of business owner and entrepreneur. All of those experiences have shaped my life, and you know what? I am grateful for each one of them. There is no way that I could understand or be where I am today if I had not had the opportunities that I have had to take detours in life.
If you have been fortunate enough to have had one job for forty years, are now retired and living on a nice pension with lots of benefits, then I have one word for you: Congratulations! But, I think all of us would agree that scenario is more of a rarity now than it was just a few decades ago.
The fact is that we all learn and grow on a daily basis. If every person reading this Tip could share their story, they would reveal that many times they have ended up in places they never imagined they would have gone. But, detours are not all bad. A detour can cause us to slow down in life. Sometimes we all need to stop and smell the roses. Detours cause us to see new scenes as we travel roads we perhaps would never have traveled otherwise. And, it is on those roads that we see sights, meet people, and have experiences that we would have missed if we had not been on the detour.
Just last year I took a detour and ended up on the backside of nowhere. But, I stopped at a roadside restaurant that had the best peach pie I’ve ever had in my whole life. What a great detour that was!
Detours can also help us find shortcuts. It is amazing to me how much traffic gets log-jammed on the road when there may be a shortcut only a couple of blocks away that we could take if we only knew our way around. A detour helps us to find new ways to get to where we are going.
Detours can happen in our personal relationships as well. I would venture to guess that none of us who have children realized the extent or cost of the commitment we were making when we became parents. Having a family certainly changes the direction of almost everything we wanted to do in life. Hopefully, it turned us in a better direction than we would have been going otherwise. Yet, even in families, sometimes relationships end. But still those kinds of painful detours can lead us to do things better at our next given opportunity.
The older I get, the more I appreciate having to take a detour. Although it is forced upon us at times, it pays rich dividends because it does things for us that we would otherwise have missed. Anyone who has lived long enough to see the power that a detour can bring into a person’s life has no doubt come to a place in the road where they simply could not go on the route they had originally intended any longer. The detour becomes necessary, and ultimately it becomes a blessing because it leads them to their final destination.
The next time you are traveling and come to a detour in the road, rather than being frustrated and upset, why not ask yourself where this experience could take you? It may be something as simple as finding a great piece of peach pie, or it may mean a new job opportunity, or perhaps running into the love of your life. Let a detour become your friend because it is on that journey that you may find everything that you are looking for without realizing that was the purpose of the detour all along!
Tip: Sometimes we must take a detour before we can get to our destination!
Have a great week! God bless you!
Dr. Robert A. Rohm
