The One About Robert Frost, Satan, Temptation, and the Choices Before Us
Dear Congregation
I can still remember where I was when I first read Robert Frost. I was an 8th grader at King Edward VII School for Boys, and my English teacher was a very eccentric but truly brilliant man by the name of Mr Paetzold. He stood in front of a class of very uninterested collisions of hormones and insecurity and recited Frost’s most famous poem, The Road Less Traveled.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
What ought to have been our very own Dead Poet’s Society moment was probably ruined by the foolish jesting of boys who don’t know what to do with the awkwardness that settles on a room when one’s own mortality and foolishness is exposed. But, I couldn’t partake in the jesting. I was spellbound. The options of my life lay before me. Two roads, two paths, two ways to live.
As I look back on it now, some 32 years later, I realize that this moment - and Frost’s option of two ways to live, didn’t actually represent a single choice that determined the trajectory of the rest of my life. Rather, life is ongoingly filled with this choice. Our story lands up being the culmination of millions of these choices.
I was thinking about this during my time in the Scriptures the other day. The text before me was from Mark 1 and the story of the baptism - and subsequent temptation - of Jesus. The language of the transition from the water to the desert is stark.
The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. - Mark 1:12
Jesus had just experienced the ultimate high of heaven’s affirmation of His calling as the beloved Son. There must have been the perfectly understandable temptation to just bask in that for a bit. But, Jesus obeyed the instruction of the Spirit, which took Him down a path He probably wouldn’t ordinarily have chosen. He chose the way of the Spirit. He took the path less traveled, the road that led to the desert.
Reading this afresh this week made me think of how it foreshadows the choice that Paul puts before the believer in their everyday lives. In Galatians 5, Paul says that the believer has two possible roads to travel. They can walk the road of their flesh, or the way of the Spirit. But you can’t walk both. To go down one of them is to miss the view that the other one holds. He says that if we choose the path of the Spirit, then we won’t want (or be able) to walk the path of the flesh. But, if we choose the path of the flesh, then we will find ourselves at odds, and unable to see the path of the Spirit. (Gal 5:16-25)
And so, friends, our lives lie before us, and with the complex paths of our stories, we have thousands of small decisions ahead of us on which way to walk. All conversations, stresses, temptations, and distractions, are opportunities for us to choose the way of the Spirit or the way of the flesh. If you want to know which path is which, Paul outlines that in Galatians 5, but a simple way to tell is that the path of obedience to the Spirit is usually the one less worn, less obvious to others, the one less traveled by.
I have really enjoyed facing the many decisions of every day by asking …
Is this the way of the Spirit, or the way of my flesh?
Choose the way of the Spirit. Choose the road less traveled by.
The music this week is from a small Scottish band called Wrest.
The simple plea of the chorus might be the plea that you need to hear.
Keep going.
Indeed.
See you soon.
Ross
