40 Ways My Labyrinth is Like My Life--#6

6. If you stay on the Path and you don't turn back, you WILL get there.

This goes along with the last one, about wandering around, heading away from the center as often as toward it. I would love it if life were a straightforward path to the Prize (of the high calling in Christ--Philippians 3:14). In fact, I used to think that's what the Bible expression "strait and narrow" meant. Today we hear talk of the "straight and narrow," but that's a mistranslation. The original expression is actually redundant. (Hebrew writers loved redundancy.) Strait means tight or narrow. The path to heaven, or for that matter, any other life path, is decidedly not straight! In fact, it's often tortuous. Like a labyrinth.

One of the things I didn't know before I had one is that a labyrinth is not a maze. They are two different concepts entirely. In a maze, there are many false paths and dead ends, and it's difficult to find your way to the center--or out again once you get there. From children's activity books to famous mazes such as the one at Hampton Court Palace, mazes have been confusing people for centuries. There are certainly similarities to life in mazes. Life on this planet does contain stops, starts, false paths, and dead ends, and it's possible to get "stuck" or "lost" in a closed loop that never takes you anywhere but over the same old ground time and again.

But a labyrinth has a different message, which also contains life lessons. It has only one path, with no false starts or dead ends. One of the roots of labyrinths is in Celtic tradition. The Celts were fond of using intricate knots to represent both the complexity and the unity of life. In a Celtic knot, there are no ends, and no matter how many twists and turns there may be, it is all endless, like eternity. This could be (and has been) taken as a symbol that there are no wrong paths and all of them lead only to God, but that's not what is represented by a labyrinth. You see, you can be in the labyrinth, or outside of it. If you are in it, then, as my pastor is fond of saying, "If you stay on the path and if you don't turn back, you will get there!" But if you don't come in through the gate and walk the path, you will, in fact, never reach the center. This holds true for eternity as well as for the smaller goal of reaching the true center of your own being, where God would love to meet with you. You get to choose knowledge or ignorance, light or darkness.

The same pastor is also fond of admonishing us to hold hands. We can encourage each other to step through the door of the unknown, help each other to stay on the path, lend each other a hand in the tricky parts, sit down and cry together now and then.

Meet you in the middle!