“I will lift up my eyes to the hills — From whence comes my help? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul. The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore.” (Psalm 121 NKJV)

When I was a young girl, The Sound of Music had just been released to the theatres, and I was invited to join neighbours on an evening outing to watch it. My friends were immigrants from Austria, and the father, Walter, had been raised in the same region that the movie was filmed. We all sat enthralled with the story, the music, and the scenery, and you could have heard a pin drop in the theatre. The closing scenes were of the Von Trapp family hiking over the mountains seeking freedom from the Nazis. Suddenly the spell was broken as Walter jumped to his feet shouting, “You’re going the wrong way!” Obviously, the movie makers preferred that scenery as the backdrop, but it was inaccurate, and my friend, being familiar with the area, realized it. He had become so completely drawn in to the movie that he felt the need to warn the Von Trapps before it was too late.

The inaccuracy of the beautiful film reminds me of our attractive world that is now dominated by deceptions, partial knowledge, inaccuracies, and convenience. It is so easy to be drawn in to secular lives that are wrongly influenced by sins that are made to seem so innocuous, rather than godly lives that are guided by the teachings of Christ as written in the Bible. Just as the movie makers used pretty scenery to make a lovely, but inaccurate, movie, the secular world tries to lure us down the wrong paths by offering enticing lifestyles that don’t match up with the life that God wants us to live. We need to guard our behaviour carefully so that we aren’t leading pretty lives that are false. We all need a “Walter” to guide us and to call us out when we stray off course. Let’s not ignore God when He nudges us back. His directions in our guidebook, the Bible, are clear.

Prayer: Thank You for being our leader in life, Lord. It is so easy to stray onto the wrong path, and we need Your guidance daily. Open our eyes to see and our ears to hear when You give us direction, and then, grant us the courage to move our feet in the way that You want us to go. In Your holy name, we pray. Amen.

Copyright © 2022, by Mary Ellen Miller <mem1955@sympatico.ca>, first published on the PresbyCan Daily Devotional presbycan.ca .
Hillsburgh, Ontario, Canada

Reprinted from PresbyCan with author’s permission