Dead-End Living

Have you ever gotten up early in the morning on a particular day, simply to discover that your life was doing tiring and meaningless circles around a dead-end cult-de-sac? You are spinning your wheels and spending expensive fuel but going nowhere. 

What makes the journey so much painful is that you want to get out of the downward spiral, but you just don't know how. You want to make forward progress, you want to ride down satisfaction Avenue but once again you are trapped on dead-end street.

Traveling on a dead-end road deadens your spirit. It weakens your heart muscles of joy. You want a solution. You are tired of it and want to get out of a dead en situation and into joy filled satisfaction – you just want to know how go get back on the right road.

We have all been down dead-end road. We have the t shirts, the baseball cap and the tattoos to prove the fact – that we've all been there. We awaken to see a face in the mirror that many years ago we knew and loved. Vitality has been slowly leaking out of our tired bodies and weary hearts. We become consumed with unenthused chores around the home and the lifeless repetition of tasks at the office which cannot lead us to close the deal. The many calls and promises that can't land us a sale. We've all been down dead-end road.

We may hate to admit it, but we feel that intimacy in our relationships has become so routine and what frightens us is not the distance itself, but the fear that deep inside of us we have lost the gumption to fight for love. We see our children grow up and see them ride the bus of life with joy and big dreams, and the meaninglessness dripping out of our souls make us cynics of their optimism. We are just stuck on dead-end road.

The single person has spent so many lonely nights, that he has given up the fight of hoping that better days or better prospects will soon come. So he has learned to compromise and do the unthinkable – to go bed with loneliness – a friend without benefits. We have all been down that road and have met many interesting people who were so different from us but who were all, made in the same image of disappointment.

Some get so weary of the emptiness that they choose to pull the plug on life. Others choose the path of narcotics – and find the best way to still the voice of hope. Some chose to take God to court – to sue for what appears to be a cruel joke played on them on the cosmic stage of life. Yet, there are those of us who sense that deep within, there is a still voice - which softly speaks in the boisterous noise of cult-de-sac living – "there is more love, peace, and joy ahead." We want to believe, we want to see, we want to feel it, but we just don't know the way out. We lack the desire and the passion to pursue the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We believe it's there – we long, we wait, we hope, and we pray for it. We want the wisdom to know our way out of dead-end living. We want direction so we can make our way to our pot of gold.