This morning I came upon this short but meaningful story about how obstacles can actually be a help to us. If we learn to look at them in the right way sometimes we'll see how they can get us going into the right direction. What ever the obstacle there is always a good side to it even if we don't see it right away.

Making a Beeline

By Curtis Peter Van Gorder

I was waiting for a friend to pick me up and decided to bide my time in the quiet of an empty restaurant. Against a window pane next to where I was sitting, a bee frantically tried to escape his transparent prison. It would fly up the pane until it became so tired that it fell back to the bottom, only to repeat the futile effort over and over. It seemed programmed to do no other. The curious thing was that only a few inches away there was an open door. The bee just didn't see it. Perhaps it never considered a horizontal flight path to freedom, or perhaps the few inches of window frame seemed impossible to circumvent. To the bee, the outside and freedom looked so real, so close, yet inaccessible.

It wasn't until after about 10 minutes of failure after failure that the bee escaped. How did it do it? It was scared into it. A passer-by inadvertently bumped the window pane from the outside and the bee felt threatened. It didn't understand that the glass that separated it from freedom also shielded it from its imagined predator. Trying to avoid danger, it broke out of its routine, darted back a few inches, saw daylight elsewhere, and took off through the open door.

Have you ever felt like that bee? Have you ever felt like a prisoner to a routine from which there was no way to escape? Has the thought of freedom been compelling, but actual freedom seemed unattainable? God does allow obstacles in all of our lives that can seem as insurmountable and impenetrable as that pane of glass, but often it's to get us to go another direction, through an open door and on a beeline to freedom.