Tim Keller

Most people say that their big encounters with God happened because they thought their whole life was on a detour. They were in the wrong job. They were in the wrong city. They were in the wrong relationship — a lot of us feel like we’re in the wrong body because we are not supposed to have a body that looks like this. You know, in other words there’s something wrong with our whole life. There’s an irony for the narrator of Exodus to say Moses was on "a detour." How could one of the epochal meetings in the history of human race between a human being and God — how could that be a detour? But over and over again, God meets us in the wilderness. He meets us in the desert. When we think our life is on a detour, it’s really spiritual main street. When we think everything is going wrong, it’s going wrong because it forces us to think in ways we wouldn’t have thought otherwise. It forces us to seek in ways we wouldn’t have sought otherwise. When things aren’t going according to your plan, when you think you’re on a back road, it’s main street spiritually.

~ from the sermon "The Lord of Salvation"