There comes a moment when, as an old song says, You is or you ain’t. King David arrived at the place in his life where he decided he was not going down that particular road again. We’ve all got one of those roads, right? 

The last six weeks of recovery from surgery have passed fairly quickly. Frequent naps help pass the time. I have been wonderfully productive for up to two hours per day. The lethargy endemic to spinal cord surgery has sapped my stamina and dulled my mind. This has been frustrating in the extreme. 

New frustrations popped up this week. As the technical wizard I am, I have my laptop computer to my left, my desktop computer right in front of me, and my iPad to the right on my desk. I can use the same mouse on each screen. Sometimes, the pointer gets stuck on one screen or another until I somehow find a way to get it to move where I want it. 

The settings on my laptop and desktop have lost synchronization. Each day now, this writing app stops me and asks which version of what I’m writing I want to keep. The problem is that I am only writing one version, but it is somehow creating two. Neither version is complete in itself. If you have wondered why these morning missives have arrived at unpredictable moments, now you know. 

The cut-and-paste feature that saves me dozens of keystrokes a day has stopped working. My keyboard refuses to type every tenth “s.” 

I could go on. 

I could get really good and irritated. Or, I could laugh and spend the rest of the day trying to repair whatever I messed up to put me in this conundrum. I choose the latter, but I will not begin until I’ve had a good, long walk and prayer time to cool down. I need all the grace I can gather to solve this problem.

There comes a time in our lives when we have to call “Halt!” We decide one final time that the issue that is causing us so many problems is not going to cause us any more problems ever. That’s what it sounds like King David did here. 

I wonder when he wrote these words. Was it after his affair with Bathsheba and all the unpleasant—and deadly—consequences? 

My computer issues do not rise to that level of seriousness, but other issues certainly have through the years. If you need the right encouragement and the right words to help you take a stand, use King David’s example and declaration and use it as your own. It is as if KD wrote STOP on a piece of parchment and poked it in his pocket to pull as often as his problem popped up. Go, thou, and do likewise.

Then add to it, maybe even on the other side of the parchment, what you should do instead. Reminders and touchstones help us stay on the right path. To that end, I will now don my walking shoes, I can’t call them running shoes anymore and hit the trail. I’m confident I will find the grace I need as I seek God’s face. 

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I will let God guide me in the way I should go.

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Our Father, lead me step by step through the challenges of this day. Bless me with grace superior to the problems and laughter at my ability to cause myself such complications with so little effort. Bless me as well with the resolution to stay on the right path and to likewise stay far away from all that would trip me up. Amen.