My parents would sometimes tell me, “You can’t see the forest through the trees.”
It was their way of reminding me that sometimes we become so focused on what is directly in front of us that we lose sight of the bigger picture. And there is truth in that. Sometimes we are too close to a situation to see what others can see. Sometimes our hopes, fears, and emotions make it difficult to recognize what is obvious to someone standing outside the situation.
But there is another truth we often overlook: The people standing outside the forest cannot see the other side either. They can see the trees. They can see the size of the forest. They can see the obstacles. They can see the uncertainty. But they cannot see where the forest ends. They do not know whether you are at the beginning of the journey or whether you are two swings of the machete away from stepping into a clearing you never knew existed.
Sometimes people mistake an obstacle for a destination. They see a wall and assume it is the end. They see darkness and assume there is nothing beyond it. But every forest has an edge. Every night eventually becomes morning. Every winter eventually gives way to spring. The challenge is that the person walking through the forest does not know exactly how close they are. They only know they have to keep moving.
There is a scene from The Wizard of Oz that illustrates this perfectly. Dorothy is walking through the frightening forest on her way to Oz. She does not know where the road leads. She does not know how far away the Emerald City is. She cannot see the destination through the trees. She simply keeps following the road. And then, suddenly, after another turn, the forest ends. There it is. The Emerald City. The destination that was invisible moments before becomes visible.
That is how life often works. We pray for direction, but we want God to reveal the entire journey before we take the first step. We want the map. We want the guarantee. We want to know exactly when the struggle will end. But faith rarely works that way. When God called Abraham, He did not give him a complete travel plan. He told Abraham to leave what was familiar and go to a land He would show him. Abraham had to move before he saw. He had to trust before he understood. He had to walk through the unknown before he arrived at the promise.
The people around Abraham could have looked at him and said, “Why are you leaving everything you know? You don’t even know where you’re going.” And from their perspective, that may have seemed foolish. But they could not see what God saw. And neither can we. Looking back on our own lives, we often judge the forests we walked through by how difficult they were.
But sometimes the forest was not there to stop us. Sometimes it was there to prepare us. Every relationship teaches us something. Every disappointment reveals something. Every closed door redirects something. Every difficult season shapes something. Even the paths that did not lead where we hoped still gave us something we needed along the way.
Then one day my mother told me, “Never give up on the brink of a miracle.”
Those words are powerful because we rarely know how close we are. The hardest moment may not be proof that you are going the wrong direction. It may be the moment before the breakthrough. The person who quits halfway through the forest never sees what was waiting on the other side.
So, keep walking. Keep trusting. Keep swinging the machete. Because you may not see the end of the forest. The people watching from outside may not see it either. But God does.
And someday, you may step out of the trees and realize that the forest you were trying to escape was the very path that led you to where you were meant to be.
Every person has a story. Every journey has a purpose. And every challenge has the potential to transform who we become.
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