The Road Much Traveled

I have been walking on this road for a long time.  If I started walking it at baptism, I was nine years old.  If you figure from the time I mark as the moment I said "yes" to Jesus as an adult, then the walk begins just before I graduated from high school.  Looking back, though, gives me a sense that I was on the road before either of those two life changing events.  I think dealing with my father's death at age seven was the first time I found my feet on the road that would finally bring me to faith in Christ. 

 

Regardless of the place where I stepped on this road, I have been on this journey of faith a long, long time.  In the beginning I had no sense of the others who had walked the road ahead of me.  As the years have passed I have come to an awareness of the many footprints that are etched in the dirt behind and ahead of me.  I am not the first one to walk this road.  Peter and John have left their footprints on the path.  The Apostle Paul, too.  Others have left evidence of being on the road as well.  Francis, Clare, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Martin Luther, John Wesley, Dwight L. Moody, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, E. Stanley Jones, and Mother Teresa  are just a few of the others whose footprints can be seen.

 

If all who walked this road could walk it at the same time, there would hardly be enough room for these feet of mine to walk.  I should never be on the same road as these anyway.  And when I stop and realize that the first feet on the road were the feet of the crucified and risen One of God, I find myself knowing that my place is not on the road, but somewhere off on the side where only sinners dare walk.  But, then the road I have been walking is not just a dirt filled dusty road marked by the footprints of the saints, but a road covered with grace.  And, so by the grace of God, I walk on.