Mom and Dad My mother-in-law wrote my husband Chuck recently. She was reminiscing of a day we spent together in Colorado when we snapped her favorite picture of her and my father-in-law before he passed away. It's a glorious photograph of mom and dad with the foothills of Pikes Peak, America’s mountain, poised in the background. In the foreground are the warm smiles and loving embrace of a beautiful couple.
The route to get that memorable photograph was not a traditional one. It required us to pile our parents into our van and drive them up a bumpy, unfamiliar, unpaved mountain road. When Chuck turned the van off the highway and on to that road, our pace slowed dramatically. For quite awhile our vehicle bounced and bumped as we encountered rocks, switchbacks and washed out road conditions.
The route to get that memorable photograph was not a traditional one. It required us to pile our parents into our van and drive them up a bumpy, unfamiliar, unpaved mountain road. When Chuck turned the van off the highway and on to that road, our pace slowed dramatically. For quite awhile our vehicle bounced and bumped as we encountered rocks, switchbacks and washed out road conditions.
In the moment, our passengers verbally and non-verbally expressed their doubts to us about having chosen to navigate that particular road. All these years later, the lasting result was worth the transient discomfort of the route we chose to get there.
I loved my husband's response and the poem he shared with her :
I loved my husband's response and the poem he shared with her :
We could have driven home that day from our Blue Bell ice cream excursion in Woodland Park via the smooth, predictable, efficient route down the highway.
Instead, we went another way home via Rampart Range Road.
I'm so glad that we persevered that day...up, across and down that slow, bumpy, washboard mountain road...an alternative, inconvenient route towards home...to make that memory.
The route to a beautiful outcome is often marred with turbulence.
Chuck
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 black.
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.
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 black.
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.
And so is life, as orchestrated by our Heavenly Father. Perhaps slow, bumpy, and turbulent in seasons, but all the while positioning us for a beautiful picture of what we have become as His beloved.
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