day 669: The Golden Path

“Let me hear of your unfailing love each morning, for I am trusting you. Show me where to walk, for I give myself to you.”

When I worked in the fast moving consumer goods business, the sales and marketing team were always talking about the importance of the “golden path”. For those not in the business of selling products in retail, this is the path that a retail store wants to force us to walk as we shop in a store. Grocery stores are the best of the best at this and through the in-aisle displays, end-cap displays and specials they can get almost all of their shopping traffic to walk the same route. If you are a manufacturer and you can get on the golden path at the right point and place, then sales can also become golden. Other businesses also have their own golden path as it relates to customer and consumer interactions. Certainly in the online world driving consumers to the right pages in a sequence can be just as much of an impact as getting someone to walk down a physical store aisle. Even internally we see that we all walk paths, follow routines and process, and systematically do similar things day-to-day, week-to-week and year-to-year. Without a path to follow or a process to subscribe to it would be no wonder why disorganization and randomness may appear in a business. We can all benefit from finding and knowing the golden paths of our businesses and then trying to stay on them.

In our walk with the Lord, He also sets us on His golden path. It is always there, right in front of us to choose to follow, or not. When we trust in Him and follow, we find that He will lead and provide for us as we need. It is when we take our self-inflicted detours that we can find ourselves moving away. The direction signs to the path come from the Word of the Bible, our prayer time and our fellowship with other believers. How hard are we looking for God’s path for us and then once we are on it, how hard are we working to stay consistently on it? If the golden path has seemed to elude us, then today is the day to crack back open that Bible and ask God to show us His way back for us.

Reference: Psalm 143:8 (New Living Testament)