Stay On the Path

“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” - Proverbs 14:12

Paths are important. Paths tell us where to go. Just as significantly, paths tell us where not to go. I learned this lesson vividly at the age of 10 on one of my family’s overseas adventures. Every year or so, we would journey to Chiang Mai, Thailand, for our organization’s mission conference and would stay an extra week to enjoy a vacation from the blustery weather back in Mongolia, where my parents worked as missionaries. It was during these vacations that we would swim, climb waterfalls, ride elephants, and visit zoos.

Zoos in Thailand are different than zoos in America. At the Chiang Mai zoo, a level of autonomy and trust is granted to the visitors that would appall an American zoo’s liability lawyer.

The Chiang Mai zoo provided simple paths to stroll around the animal enclosures (which weren’t always very “enclosed”), and there wasn’t much preventing someone from going rogue if they were desperate to meet the animals face to face. It was as though the zoo owners assumed no one would be silly enough to go off the path…

But they didn’t know my dad.

Our family of six was standing on-path at the zoo, watching a couple of crocodiles snooze in the afternoon sun, when my dad decided to go off-path. The crocodiles weren’t being entertaining enough, and he wanted to get up close, toss a few pebbles, and get them moving. He ventured off before my mother could stop him, leaving us kids waiting eagerly for the action to unfold. A few minutes later, he came screaming out of the jungle.

He had failed to stir up the crocodiles, but had succeeded in stepping on a mound of angry red ants, a particularly nasty specimen to encounter in that part of the world. He lurched towards us, flailing and tearing off his clothing as we, and the other passing zoo visitors, stood slack-jawed.

We eventually got all the red ants off of him, but he had learned his lesson, and I had learned mine: it’s better to stay on the path.

We're all walking a path. Throughout our lives, we'll encounter countless trails branching off from the narrow one we're on. Some offshoots will look attractive, some confusing, some will seem to promise a shortcut to some better road. But we can never forget that we have an enemy whose single aim is our destruction, and he is a master of disguise. He doesn't lure us toward death by making death look like death; he dresses it up as adventure, as freedom, or as just the more interesting road. Sin almost always looks good in the moment, and that's the trick. But step off the path and you'll find what's really there: a monster crouching in the underbrush, waiting to devour you.

Once you see sin for what it actually is, you can't hate it enough.

If God says that something is sin, believe Him. If God says that sin leads to death, believe Him. Next time you’re tempted to do or say something wrong, remember what waits at the end of that wide road. By God's grace, strive to stay on the right path.

One way we keep our feet and heart in line is opening God’s Word and praying to him consistently.

Scripture is our map, and prayer is our conversation with the One who drew it. Without these means of grace, we're guessing at every fork in the trail, squinting at landmarks we don't recognize, and drifting toward the red-ant-occupied underbrush without even realizing it.

The Psalmist understood this when he wrote, "Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path" (Psalm 119:105). Notice he didn't say a floodlight illuminating the next ten miles. A lamp shows you the next step, and then the step after that. That's often how God works with us. He doesn't always reveal the whole journey at once, but He gives us enough light to take the next faithful step. Our job is to keep walking in the light He's given.

Staying faithfully on the path is rarely a single dramatic decision. It's a thousand small ones. It's choosing to open your Bible when your phone is screaming for attention. It's whispering a prayer in the car before a hard conversation. It's pausing before you click, before you speak, before you go where you know you shouldn't. The path is kept by faithfulness in the small moments, long before the crocodiles and red ants ever come into view.

And when we do stray—because we will sometimes—the path is still there. God is patient with His wandering children. The same Word that warns us also calls us back. The same Father who says "stay on the path" runs down the road to welcome us back.

My dad eventually laughed about the red ants. It became one of those family stories we still tell, complete with exaggerated reenactments. But the lesson stuck, and not just for him. Sometimes God uses our small disasters to teach us about the bigger ones we've been spared. The sting of red ants is nothing compared to the sting of sin's consequences—but if a swarm of ants in a Thai jungle can remind us to trust God's boundaries, then maybe it was worth the trouble.

So stay on the path. Read the map. Talk to the Guide. And when you're tempted to wander, remember: there is no better place to be then on the right path.

It will lead you home to Him.