Imagine a friend of yours flies into town, rents a car and drops by your house to pick you up. Knowing your friend as well as you do, you’ve mapped out all the places you know she’d love to visit.

You’ve got a couple nice, but inexpensive restaurants in mind. There’s a scenic overlook just outside of town with a breathtaking view. You have a few friends you know she’d love to meet.

You also know areas of town to avoid. You know the streets undergoing road construction. You know the rush hour traffic patterns. You know the shops that are way overpriced.

As you set out on your day together, you tell your friend to make a right at the next stoplight. Instead, your friend says she’d rather go left, which she does. When you try to persuade her to head back the other way, she gets annoyed and is more determined to continue in the same direction.

You know the road she has chosen leads nowhere. Literally. After about five or six miles of bumpy, unpaved roads, she’ll come to a sign that simply says, “Bridge Out. Road Closed.” Her only option will be to turn around and drive back.

You glance at your watch, knowing there’s so much to do, but not much time.

After wasting much of the morning, you suggest picking up some lunch and eating at the overlook. You know that sometimes you can see bald eagles soaring above the cliffs. Instead, your friend pulls into a fast food place and gets out of the car.

After lunch, you see if she wants to head downtown to check out some fun little shops that carry just the kinds of things she’ll like. She’s says it sounds good, but then asks for directions to the mall. Most of the afternoon is spent walking around department stores. Ones you’re pretty sure she has at the mall where she lives.

After a disappointing afternoon, you tell your friend you’ve got something fun planned for dinner. There’s a great little Italian place a couple blocks from your apartment where you’ve planned to meet some friends you really think she’ll enjoy. You can’t wait to introduce her to them. You’re pleasantly surprised when your friend agrees to the dinner plans.

Your friends all arrive on time and you introduce them to your out of town guest. Everything is going well, until she excuses herself to take a phone call. Thirty minutes later, after the appetizers have been cleared and the entrees served, your friend rejoins the group, but begins to complain about her food being cold.

She then spends the remaining time texting. Occasionally, she nods her head or says, “Uh huh” to show she’s engaged in the conversation, but she’s really not.

As you lay in bed that night reflecting back on the day, you think about all of the fun you could have had, all of the things you wish your friend could have seen and done and experienced. You wonder how things might have been. You know it could have been such a good day.

So I wonder how much we miss out on when we insist on going our own way instead of God’s way. Not just for a day, but for a month or a year or five years.

How might God have blessed us? Who did He want us to meet? What did He want to show us? What did He want us to experience? What did He want us to learn? What did He want to give us? How did He want to use us?

But because we wanted to go our own way and do our own thing, we missed out.

God is always gracious and He gives second (and third and fourth…) chances, but there are always consequences, aren’t there? We might think we’ve come through unharmed and no worse off, but that’s not really true.

Any time we step outside of God’s will, there’s always a loss. We’re always less because of it.

Missed blessings. Missed opportunities. Missed relationships. Missed experiences. Missed growth. Missed wisdom.

It’s an unknown and very expensive price to pay for going our own way.

You may not always see the value in spending time in God’s word each day, but what if that is when He’s helping you think more like He does? And what if you’re then able to make different, better decisions because you understand His will and His ways?

What if those decisions set you on a different course? The right course? His course for your life? And then you get to experience your life as He intended it?

It’s possible to miss out on God’s best for your life. It happens one little decision at a time.

I wonder how much more diligent we would be to seek God and obey Him if we could see just how much we were missing.