Photo: West Devon: A30 Okehampton turn off © Lewis Clarke, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Original image can be viewed Here
Back in the mid-80s, I was living and working in West Devon while engaged to a girl from the West Midlands (who would later become my wife!). That meant that I got to know the entirety of the M5 very well and the same goes for Okehampton. I saw more of Okehampton than I would have liked because back in those days the main A30 route drove straight through the middle of the town where, on bad days, you could spend considerable time stuck in traffic jams.
Later, after we were married and living at the top end of the M5, we would sometimes holiday back in Okehampton at a B&B on that same busy A30 road. Except that it was no longer busy. In July 1988, the Okehampton bypass was opened and this section of road that had been the stuff of nightmares suddenly became a tranquil back way. Good news for most of us although not so much for the garage and other establishments who now found themselves bypassed. We went back there recently travelling that same road for nostalgic reasons.
Of course, we see the very same thing locally with the Old London Road at Washbrook. It remains dual carriage way but found itself bypassed by the new section of the A12 running up to the Copdock roundabout.
Many of us will have children or others for whom we are praying and hoping that faith will reignite in their lives. I say reignite because these are people who at an earlier stage of life were shown the paths on which to go (Proverbs 22:6). Many of them will have even begun to travel that road of faith for themselves. But then other roads became available to them that seemed more attractive and more convenient. The former way they were travelling fell into disuse.
Don’t lose hope. The message of Okehampton and Washbrook is that those old roads rarely disappear. They are still there and, more than that, people who once travelled them still know where they are. Go on praying that those who are on your heart right now may, when the time is right, return to their former ways. Pray that, as happened to us recently when we were in the vicinity of Okehampton, things may happen to remind them of the road they were once on that they may once again seek it out.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, the early Christians were described as ‘followers of the way’. We pray for those who were brought up to follow your way but have now been diverted away from it. May they have cause to remember and to rediscover what it is to travel that road. Amen.