"The Road Less Traveled", by Robert Frost

Pretty much every kid who read much growing up or took any kind of advanced English classes has read this famous poem. When I read it now, fresh off a crossroads in my own life which is still very visible in the rearview mirror, it has much deeper meaning.

During my experience at Boot Camp (a spiritual experience, not the military), we were asked to pretend that everyone in the room had died except for a very few people. I was among the "dead", and we had to write our own epitaphs for our gravestones, and mine was "Here lies Chris, dead of a lack of faith and forgiveness." The latter I am doing substantially better with than I ever thought possible, while the former is proving much more difficult. It's strange, because I am in a better place than I am when trying to figure out a way to start writing a paper (back in school days) or some creative work from a blank page. Not only do I have some material to start with, I've even managed quite a few steps down the path of living in faith, with some encouraging successes (a few big, others smaller) to my credit in so doing. The problem is that living by faith, much like any other creative endeavor, is an ongoing process. No more than a songwriter can quit writing an album after producing a killer chorus and hook for a single song, can I rest on past successes of living by faith. The reason for this is that life is learned looking backward, experienced in the present, and lived going forward.

It reminds me of the song "How to Save a Life", by The Fray. Part of the lyrics say, "As he begins to raise his voice, you lower yours, and grant him one last choice; drive until you lose the road, or break with the ones you've followed." To carry the analogy of these lyrics out to the end, when it came to trying to do things on my own, completely bereft of faith or patience, I drove that road until I flipped the car and nearly perished in the process. Someone very dear to me and much more spiritually advanced than I once told me, "If you want to bring down the fires of hell on your head, start living by faith and see what happens."

That's very true, and I know this because am walking through that right now. Simply being myself and trying to live the best I can as the man God wants me to be has caused me some problems...I've lost people from my life who are very dear to me, and it's no fun. I fight daily the urges to go back to the well-worn paths of impatience and lack of faith, not because I think they will breed success, but because they are familiar, if only in a painful sort of way. I am hopeful that the more time and distance that I put between myself and my well-worn paths of failure, the weaker my urges to return to living habits that led to failures past will be.

To hurry up and wait on God is one of, if not the hardest, tasks required for successful living set before us as human beings. I am trying very hard to take the "hurry up and wait" road less traveled, and I have to despite the sometimes arduous struggle. The good news is that I have already made a decision and undertaken the journey, now all that remains is to summon the necessary perseverance to follow wherever the path I have chosen leads me. The ending to my travels down the path of faith are uncertain, but they at least offer some hope of good, successful, and happy endings, whereas if I punk out and go back down the wrong road simply because it's a known one, I know I am doomed. It is in this knowledge that I soldier on down Mr. Frost's road not taken.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden back.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I—I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.