And by "sometimes" I mean "alotofthetimes".
Twice in the last month I've gotten stuck out in Northern Virginia past the time I-66 turns into crazy-psycho-land and on my way back home into the city I've tried to take a different route. And both times, in a way that only I could manage, I have ended up driving through Seven Corners, aka Seven Times Worse Than Hell.
Seven Corners is this mess of converging roads that is always crowded and ugly and horribly confusing to drive through and it makes me want to pull all of my hair out or ram my car full force into a stop sign. I have screamed at the top of my lungs in my car while driving there. (really). I say words that could only be expressed in symbols and punctuation signs. I lose my cool. Because, seriously- it is the WORST. It is worse than the worst. And I hate going there.
But somehow, twice in the past month, there I've been. I simply couldn't avoid it.
It's funny - because sometimes I feel like my life is full of Seven Corners and back I find myself in the same place, upset about the same issue or worrying about the same things I've always worried about or learning something I thought I'd already mastered. I find myself going back there, to the places I wanted to be done and over with spiritually and emotionally -- and that is hard sometimes. With that "sometimes" really being "allthetimes".
Have you ever felt that? Like you just want to yell up to the sky "HEY GOD. We've been here already...did you forget or something??"
And of course, He didn't. I'm learning, during those moments when I want to bang my head against the steering wheel or find myself uttering all too familiar words in my prayers, that I will be led by the Lord to the same places until He is satisfied by what I've gained from going there.
One of my favorite verses in the bible is Philippians 1:6. It says "...he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion." To put it another way -- God is not into half-way helping you. He is not into bringing you only partly into righteousness. He is about perfection. He is about grabbing your hand (even a hand that is attached to a stubborn, screaming body in the middle of a temper tantrum) and leading you right back into your pain or your fears or your insecurities because in that place He is making you new.
I'm trying, even though it's tough, to follow His call to go back there again. Even when I think that I've learned how to be forgiving enough, or am unwilling to reopen another lie about myself that I've settled on believing, or thought I've loved someone adequately enough not to return to the difficulty of doing it again.
There are just so many places to go in this universe, so many places we can run away to, forgetting the difficult paths we walked on before. But there is no where we can go that is better than where He leads. Even if He leads us backwards.
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