Responding to the Amazing!

The Southwold Maize Maze, cut from a large field of maize, has been an annual tourist attraction for many years.

Yesterday’s Lowestoft Journal revealed that this year’s, due to open next Saturday, features a lifeboat in the centre surrounded by swirling stormy seas, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

Apparently ‘Maze’ comes from an old English word that meant‘delusion, bewilderment, confusion of thought.’ From that it developed to mean ‘a labyrinth, baffling network of paths or passages…’

Amaze: literally, to put into a maze, is used to express perturbation or bewilderment in one’s surprise… [Century Dictionary]

I have several friends whose lives are currently ‘amazing’. Their personal circumstances are perturbing, bewildering. Their life’s a maze – a baffling network of paths; they’re in the middle, not knowing which path to take.

I’ve been there. Sometimes I’ve been so confused that I just stand still, unable to make a decision, afraid that I’ll take the wrong turn. On other occasions I’ve made a decision – taken the wrong turn, and become further lost.

For many years I’ve read through my Bible throughout the year – starting in Genesis in January, and reaching Revelation in December. This morning I reached ‘Proverbs’:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
 in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight.

My Grandma wrote those words in the front of my first Bible. They were the first verses I learnt. They talk about relying on the God who can be with you through life’s maze, straightening out some of the baffling network of paths.

This morning I noticed words that provide a context for these verses:

 Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
    bind them around your neck,
    write them on the tablet of your heart.

If ‘Trust in the lord…’ talks about where I’m going and who I’m going with in life’s maze, then perhaps ‘love and faithfulness’ describes how I’m travelling…