About seven or eight miles from my home in Texas, is Interstate 45. It’s  unique among the nations interstates in that it is the only highway, with the designation of a Federal Highway System Interstate. that is completely contained within one state.

    To the north of Dallas I-45 merges into I-75 . Traveling south from Dallas on the freeway you cross the Blackland Prairie,so named because the land is an ancient floodplain of the Trinity river and is literally black with eons of river laid sediment. The soil is referred to as ” Black Gumbo” because the combination of sediment and clay makes it so sticky that people trying to dig in it will usually spend more time  scraping the muck off the shovel than actually digging.

    Continuing on in a S-SE track the four lane highway skirts the western edge of the Big Thicket, where the Ivory Billed Woodpecker was last sighted back in the 30’s. It then climbs up and through the hills around Huntsville, then descends again to the  bottoms of the Trinity River and on thru Houston, and fifty miles later comes to an end on Galveston island. If you follow the Interstate signs as far as possible, you will come to a stop in front of  a row those  round-topped wooden posts with a cable strung from post to post, facing about fifty yards of sand, and beyond that, the Gulf of Mexico.

    Now, sitting there, gazing at the brown waters of the Gulf, lapping up on the beaches of Galveston, you might be happy. You might be disappointed. You might be sad, glad, angry, resentful, grateful, or possessed of any number of honest and genuine emotions. But, you have no right to be surprised, sitting on the beach at Galveston, staring at the Gulf of Mexico. Because you put yourself on the road that goes there, and drove long enough to  arrive. If you don’t want to be sitting on the beach at Galveston, DON’T GO THERE.

Turn around, go the other way.

   At those points in our lives, as individuals or as a people, when the next “Scathingly Brilliant Idea” is delivered to us by THE EXPERTS, there are usually very quite voices [ wisdom always whispers ] that tell us that the idea is not as brilliant as it seems, that it won’t deliver what it promises, that  in fact, the very opposite of what we are hoping for is more likely to come about. These voices are often shouted down or put to scorn for the grievous sin of not being ” Compassionate “. But who has the greater compassion? The parent who lets their child blindly pursue every whim and fad, or the stick-in-the-mud mother or father who digs in their heels and obstinately refuses to allow the center of their heart to run blindly off the cliff that they know from bitter experience is hiding in the fog of the future?

             ” There is a time, we know not when, A place we know not where

               That marks the destiny of men, to glory or despair.

               There is a line ,by us unseen, that crosses every path,

               The line that marks the difference between Gods favor and His wrath.”

                              ——————————————-