Ruts
Greetings, fellow humans. A long time ago, pioneers would travel from the eastern to the western United States on a trail just a few miles from my modern day front door. For the most part, those individuals and families traveled in large, spoke-wheeled wagons across all kinds of terrain and in all kinds of weather. And as they did so, the wagons in front made very deep ruts in the trail, and the wagons in the back fell into those ruts and could not get out.
And just like that, the phrase "stuck in a rut" was born.
And it’s actually not such a bad thing, being stuck in a rut, as long as the rut in question is going in the direction that you want to go. But if you want to go in a different direction, or even in the same direction but just on your own terms, then first you have to get out of that rut. And that is where things get complicated.
The Oregon Trail is just a dusty memory now, but being stuck in a rut is still very much a real (albeit metaphorical) thing. In life, the easiest thing that a person can ever be is whatever they’ve always been, and the easiest thing that a person can ever do is whatever they’ve always done. That is the rut in which we all live. All of our lives are very well-worn in that we tend to do and feel and think the same things over and over until it’s pretty hard to do or feel or think anything else.
And I suppose that would be fine if all of our lives were already pointed in the right direction in every possible way. But that’s not the rut in which any of us live. The fact is that sometimes we all need to go in a different direction than we are used to going, and we all need to grow into life in ways that we haven't grown yet. But it is impossible to go places you’ve never gone or grow into something you’ve never been by doing what you’ve always done and being who you’ve always been. That is not how life works. And on top of that, even when we hate the ruts of life that have trapped us for years, those old ruts keep calling out to us, and they feel like home. And even if we can escape for a while, very often, we eventually just jump right back in.
It’s a pretty bleak picture.
As a person who has plenty of ruts of his own, I’m very thankful that this very problem is addressed in the Bible in the Book of Romans, Chapter 7. God used an amazing guy named Paul to write the book of Romans, but even though Paul was an amazing, faithful person, he wrote these words in the Bible about his struggles with the ruts in His own life and the sinful causes of those ruts. He said:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
Then a few verses later, he says, “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing!”
Finally, a few verses later, he says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
And then in the very next sentence, we get the answer. He says, “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
If you’re a human being on planet Earth today, and you’ve got some deep ruts in your life that you would love to escape, I have good news for you. Because you will never be able to escape those ruts on your own, God sent His Son to rescue you. And if you are ready to be rescued today, Jesus is the ultimate rut-breaker.
