Choosing the Right Path

Last Sunday, on my personal blog, Day Dreamer, I wrote about missed chances. What if while going down the right path, something happens and your journey is cut short? What if you make a mistake or someone else makes a choice that changes the course of your life? That's how I felt when I lost my contract with Valor, like maybe that was my one change to get published and that the right path had been cut short.

As the comments came in, there was one that spoke directly to my heart and made sense to me. Teri wrote:

With trials and disappointments, I have often remembered an article I read in the Ensign, almost 20 years ago. It was an article where a man wrote in about an experience he had with his son, being lost in the mountains. They had prayed at a fork in the road and felt very impressed to take one of the roads. After about 5 minutes of driving, they came to a dead end. When the son asked his father why they would feel impressed to go down a road that dead ends, the father responded something like, "The Lord told us that, so we would know without a doubt which way to go. We could have driven for hours and been doubtful if we had taken the correct road first...now we know exactly which way to go."

While not the same as your situation, perhaps now you know that Valor wasn't the right path for you to take. Now you will never have to wonder if you should have gone there....because you know.


As I thought about what that meant, I wondered if the Lord led me down that path in order to teach me a lesson. Maybe my book wasn't ready for the national market. Maybe all the rewrites Valor had me do was to prepare it for bigger and better things. And maybe now that I'll be on the RIGHT path, I won't ever look back and wonder if Valor would have been better for me. Now as I go down this other path, I can know that the Lord is leading me where I need to go. The hard part is having patience and letting things happen in His time. I was so close to seeing my dream come true, that starting over with query letters, agent research and the nerve wracking waiting game is going to drive me insane.

But even knowing all this, I think having faith in the Lord, that things will be okay, is the hardest for me. I had absolutely NO reservations with walking down that other path. I wasn't afraid, I wasn't nervous, nothing. I knew in my heart that it was the right thing thing to do and I put it in the Lord's hands. Day after day, I prayed that he would guide me in the right direction and I turned it over to him completely. So now . . . I guess I don't trust my instincts. Will I make the right choices in the future? Will I do something that messes up what the Lord has in store for me? Is that what happened this time? All I can do is work my tail off to do everything right and hope He has a Plan B.