When asked what kind of ice cream she would like, my mother always answered, “Anything but strawberry!” I didn’t think much about it until someone asked her, Why don’t you ever eat strawberry ice cream, or even strawberry jam?” She answered, Whenever I had to take a pill, my mother always crushed it up in strawberry jam . I came to hate it.” We tried to talk Mom out of her aversion for things strawberry, to no avail. She did, however, like fresh strawberries.

In every soul there are pathways that link us to our own past in ways that may or may not be relevant to our present lives. In some cases those pathways are beneficial, or at least harmless. I did laundry every Friday until recently, only because my mother had always done it on that day. Many of the pathways in our souls are almost hidden from our own selves. Attachments to people and things that were developed in years past, and attitudes that we pick up from those around us, form pathways in our spirits that are not always wholesome. Bitterness at old offenses and regrets for lost opportunities form pathways that are like threads woven into our spirits. Griefs from the loss of loved ones can leave a bitter pathway. Sometimes we are not even aware of them, but usually we assume that no one else is aware of them in us, and we can ignore them.

The psalmist perceived a different truth: “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.”(Psalm 139:1-4)

Doubts, fears, resentments, angers, and self pity all make pathways into our spirits, but the psalmist says there is a God who transcends these, with the full knowledge of where the pathways reside in us. Our work is to relinquish these and let them go. For a Christian the pathway of the Holy Spirit enables us to shake off the grip of our most hidden pathways ; and by abandoning them, we receive the gift promised by Isaiah: “Forget the former things!. . . See, I am doing a new thing! I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:18,19)

Jesus added confirmation of Isaiah’s words hundreds of years later: “Whoever believes in me, . . . as the scripture said, Living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:37) When we really surrender our own “pathways”, God sends living water to replace them.

Love in Him,

Prue