Today I want to write about the road of life—not M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” a theme he borrowed from Robert Frost’s wonderful poem by the same name—but the road of common life that every single person walks. It is the Road Well-Traveled because everybody is on it!
I sometimes think of this well-traveled road as a weary, dreary, cheery, tearful, fearful road because it is just that! Life is not a rose garden—and even if it were, there are few rose bushes that do not grow thorns. But life isn’t a rose garden. Some think “living” with Jesus is a rose garden, but it isn’t. The night in the peaceful garden of Gethsemane was followed by ridicule, scorn, a crown of thorns and a cross. The well-traveled road is tough. It is troublesome. It is the road of life—my life, your life, everybody’s life.
The disciples of Jesus walked a weary, dreary, cheery, tearful, fearful Emmaus Road centuries ago. As they walked along they talked among themselves about all that had happened to them and around them. We walk that same weary, dreary, cheery, tearful, fearful road today. Just as the disciples talked of their yesterdays on the road, so we, too, talk of our yesterdays. We ponder, as they pondered, the meaning of it all—all the happenings, all the coincidences, all the stuff of life. The Emmaus Road the disciples of Jesus walked is the same road we’ve walked “afoot and lighthearted” since life began. It is, as Whitman expressed it:
“an open road:” which we travel “healthy, free, the world before me. The long
brown path before me leading me wherever I choose…Strong and content
I travel an open road.”
That is how the journey begins on the road well-traveled. But, as the years go by, the road twists around horseshoe curves, climbs many a steep hill, and winds its way through dark shadowed valleys as well as sunlit plains and under spacious skies. No longer is it a “long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.” Rather the road becomes a weary, dreary, cheery, tearful, fearful road, leading us into places we do not wish to go. It is a road we would not choose.
G.K. Chesterton wrote “The Rolling English Road” and suggested that the English roads were made by those who stopped by the pub for a few drinks and then staggered home.
“Before the Roman came to Rye or out of Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles around the shire,…
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread…”
The Road Well-Traveled has been formed by all those who came before. (drunk or sober), and is being formed by all of us at the moment, and will be reformed by those who travel it after us.
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