When Your GPS Says “Rerouting”: Life never goes exactly as planned
You had a vision for how your career would unfold. You knew exactly how your marriage would work. You had your family plan mapped out perfectly. Then life happened. The business failed. The relationship ended. The promotion went to someone else. Infertility struggles changed everything. You’re on a detour you never saw coming. The question that matters now is simple: can you trust that you’re still on the fastest route?
Stop asking why and start asking what
When detours hit, your brain screams one word on repeat: why. Why did this happen to me? Why didn’t this work out? Why can’t I have what I planned? Here’s the problem with why—even if God explained it, you wouldn’t get it. You wouldn’t like it. You’d probably sabotage it. God’s ways are not your ways, and he doesn’t owe you an explanation. What unlocks the detour is switching your question. Ask God: what do you want me to know about this? What do you want me to know about me in this? What do you want me to know about you? Then ask: what do you want me to do? These two questions pave the road for maturity, growth, and connection to God.
Nothing is wasted when God is weaving
The lie whispers that you’ve wasted time. Wasted opportunities. Wasted your life on dead ends and wrong turns. That’s completely false. God weaves together every thread—the best moments and the worst failures—into the tapestry of your purpose. Joseph from the Old Testament got sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused of sexual misconduct, and thrown in prison for years. Every detour seemed to make things worse. But God was preparing him for something bigger than Joseph could imagine. The destination matters, but the real joy comes from traveling the detours with God. He’s Emmanuel—God with us. He’s for you, not against you. He’s near you, not far away. You were created on purpose and for purpose. The detour you’re on right now? You’re still on the fastest route.
+
Episode Summary:
Ever feel like everyone else has it figured out except you? Like maybe God forgot about you in the grand scheme of things? This episode is your wake-up call. Daron gets raw and real about the lie that you don’t matter and walks you through exactly how to hear God’s voice break through the noise of fear and comparison. This episode unpacks the spiritual battle happening in your mind and gives you practical tools to overcome the accusations that keep you stuck. If you’ve ever wondered if you’re special enough, good enough, or if God even sees you, this message will transform how you see yourself and hear from God.
Key Takeaways:
- Detours are inevitable, they’re coming to your life or you’re on one right now.
- God’s ways are higher, better, faster, and wiser than our ways.
- Asking “why” leads to frustration, asking “what” leads to transformation.
- The two maturity building questions: What do you want me to know? What do you want me to do?
- Nothing is wasted, everything is woven into the tapestry of your purpose.
- God is for you, near you, and within you on every detour.
- The joy isn’t just in the destination, it’s in traveling the detours with God.
- You’re still on the fastest route even when it doesn’t feel like it
Notable Quotes:
- “You thought it was going to work out like this, and then it worked out like that.”
- “Stop asking the question why and start asking the question what.”
- “God’s ways are not our ways. They are better, they are higher, they are faster, they are best.”
- “Nothing is wasted. Everything is woven together into the tapestry of your purpose.”
- “What brings God the greatest joy and us the greatest fulfillment is traveling the detours with Him.”
- “If God were to explain to you the why when you’re taking the detour, you wouldn’t get it anyway.”
- “The whole point is life with Him on the detours as we make our way to the final destination.”
Episode Resources:
Connect with Daron on Social Media:
Links to the Daron Earlewine Podcast
YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Libsyn
EPISODE 188 TRANSCRIPT
Daron: Hey, why should you listen to this episode? Here’s why. Because you are on a detour in your life or there is one coming. You have an idea of how you want your plan to work, your business to work, your marriage to work, your family to work, and you are on a detour that you didn’t know was coming or there’s one coming soon. And what I want to get you in this episode is the one question you can start asking differently that will help you stay present and stay on purpose on the detour you’re on or the one that’s coming. Let’s jump into the episode.
Welcome back to the Daron Earlewine Podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host. Welcome back. I want to thank you for downloading this episode, whether you’re watching on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get the content. Thanks for downloading it. And if you could do me a huge favor, take a minute and go over and subscribe to that channel. Helps us to continue to expand the podcast, its reach and its impact. And today we’re talking about finding God’s purpose after taking detours. Finding God’s purpose after taking detours.
And here’s what I know about your life. You thought it was going to work out like this, and then it worked out like that. Detours are a constant part of life. And I’ve noticed recently, driving around taking trips, one thing I love about my GPS, I don’t know if this is a new update, I didn’t recognize it in the past, but where it will give you an option of a possible detour you could take, or it will take you on a detour, and then I love when my GPS says this, you are still on the fastest route. And I love that part, because sometimes I look at it and be like, what the freak, why are we taking this exit here? Like we thought we’re going down 75. And it brings me so much peace to hear the supercomputer GPS voice tell me, listen, you’re still on the fastest route.
And it would be amazing if God could install some type of spiritual GPS inside of our brain, inside of our soul, when we face the detour in our life that’s different than just, hey, you’re going to get off 75 on exit 23, but it’s the business fails. My girlfriend breaks up with me. I fail out of college. I don’t get the promotion. We’re having struggles with infertility in our marriage. We can’t sell our house. Like, whatever it is, you’re in this moment where you have this plan. This is the way I have this plan. This is the timing I’m on. This is how it’s supposed to work. And then life happens, and I’m on a detour. I wish, I wish, I wish, and maybe after we hit the content today, you’ll have the still small voice of God’s Holy Spirit, your spiritual GPS whispering to you, listen, you’re still on the fastest route.
And if you’ve been around the podcast for a while, we’ve got a couple hundred episodes. If you’re brand new to the podcast, just came in in the past few months, I want you to know we’re not on episode like 10. This is like episode 190 or something. There’s a couple hundred episodes available to go back in and to thumb through if you want. We’ve got some on parenting. We’ve got a lot of them on finding God’s purpose for your life. We’ve got tons of interviews with great people. And we did a whole series a couple of years ago unpacking my book, which is right here, The Death of a Dream: Resurrecting Purpose When Life Doesn’t Go As Planned.
Quick read, not difficult. You can get it on Amazon right now. You can also get it on Kindle. And if you don’t like to read books, you like to listen to them, it is available on Audible and I read it to you so we can hang out in your headphones for about six hours. And so the book is a journey through my death of my dream that I had since I was in third grade and how I walked through that, how I found healing in that, how I found forgiveness in that and how God began to resurrect new dreams in my life.
But the other narrative that we walk through in the book is the story of Joseph from the Old Testament. An amazing story of a young leader, a young what you would really almost call revolutionary that had a vision, had a dream from God early on in life that was from God and came true. But between him getting the dream and him living the dream, detours would be an understatement. We all know the story, right? His brothers hate him and he’s probably a little full of himself. His brothers fake his death, sell him into slavery. He ends up in another entire land. He ends up in Egypt. He’s falsely accused of sexual misconduct. He’s put in prison for years. I mean, the detours just keep getting worse in his life, right? When you think it can’t get any worse, it does.
Fast forward to the end of this story, there’s forgiveness, there’s redemption, there’s resurrection of relationships in his family. And then he finds himself right in the center of this massive macro sized dream and vision and plan that God had in the works since his childhood. But every detour he took, what he needed to hear is, you’re still on the fastest or might be better to say you’re still on the best route.
And guys, I think what this comes down to is a very basic premise is that God’s ways are not our ways. And after living four decades, I had the perspective to say, praise God that God’s ways aren’t my ways. That being said, a lot of the detours that I’ve gone through and there have been a lot of them. When I was taking the exit ramp onto that detour, I wasn’t saying, thank God his ways are not my ways. Here’s what I said. My ways were pretty freaking good and I was pretty stoked about them and I’m not happy at all that my ways are not working out. And I think probably you felt the same way.
We have our wisdom, we have our dreams, we have our ambitions, we have the way we want our life to go. And it makes sense that we want that. It makes sense that we think that’s the best plan. But I think that’s the beauty of the unfolding of the relationship of the trust, of the process of faith, of realizing God’s ways are not my ways. They are better, they are higher, they are faster, they are best.
We talked about a couple episodes back, that passage from First John chapter 4, right? That this process is we learn to know and rely on the love of God. We learn to know and rely on the plan of God. We learn to know and rely on the wisdom of God. And most of the time, in fact, I think I could probably be confident to say all of the time, your plan is not going to work out exactly the way you thought it was going to work out. God is going to be faithful to invite you into His ways.
The danger in this is that we actually have the ability to ignore or to reject the invitation. And so sometimes I see someone’s life and they’re in a place where, man, it brings me a lot of sorrow. I see a lot of pain and a lot of things that seem to be snowballing in their life. And then I sit and talk with them and realize that they’re 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years in to never really learning to hear the voice of God guide and direct them. They’ve gotten into these detours and they’ve stayed with their thoughts. They’ve stayed with their wisdom. They’ve made it work out with the way they want it to go, and they’ve not accepted the invitation into the detours of God.
And the foundational three points we come to every single podcast is believing that God has created me on purpose and for purpose. So he actually knows where he’s leading me. These detours are something that God is inviting me to take with him because he’s for me. He’s not working against me. He has my best interests at heart. He has your best interests at heart and that God is near me in this detour, not far away. He has invited me to allow him to be within me, not just with me, but within me. He’s offered to give me the mind of Christ. He’s offered to give me his divine nature, his spirit, the fruit of his spirit. Everything I need for life and for godliness has been given to me if I will receive it and I’ll respond to it.
So I want to break this down very, very simply. This is something that was taught to me here recently. Like I said, you’re probably going to hear me say the name Jamie Winship quite a bit. Subtle plug, not for my book, but for his. If you’re looking for an amazing resource in your life, I want you to go get Jamie Winship’s book, Living Fearless. It is a life changer. Jamie Winship, Living Fearless. Go buy it, read it, listen it, memorize it. It is phenomenal.
And one of the points that Jamie makes that has shaped things massively for me and is the key to being able to respond and to receive the detours in life, it comes down to this very simple thing. Stop asking the question, why, and start asking the question, what. Your ability to stay on the fastest, best route on the detours of your life when they show up is to stop asking the question, why, and start asking the question, what. Let me unpack this.
When I look back at all the detours that came into my life, the instinctual reaction for me is to say, why God? Why did my dream die? Why did this person betray me? Why did I make this mistake? Why didn’t this work out? Why can’t I have this? Why can’t it be like this? Why, why, why? And if I look at my story, and if I look at the story of Joseph from the Old Testament, the reality is if God were to explain to you the why, when you’re taking the detour, you wouldn’t get it anyway. You wouldn’t get it. You probably wouldn’t like it. You would probably sabotage it and you’d probably not take the exit willingly. God’s ways are not our ways and he doesn’t really owe us the explanation for why he’s doing it.
There’s a place of trust. There’s a place of faith that has to come into there. And that’s something that you learn as you learn to know and rely on the love of God. And so the exercise of just putting God to the question saying, tell me why, tell me why, tell me why, it’s going to be frustrating. It’s not going to make sense. And I’m going to say it’s not going to work.
Here’s what I found to work powerfully in my life. And I think it will for you too, is when God invites me into a detour of His ways that are better, that are higher, that are more loving, that are more wise, that are more innovative, that are more creative, that are better than mine. Here’s the question that unlocks your ability to go on that detour with Him and stay on the fastest route. God, what do you want me to know about this? God, what do you want me to know about me in this? God, what do you want me to know about you in this? What do you want me to know? And then here is the follow up. And what do you want me to do?
What do you want me to know? What do you want me to do? If you’re in the midst right now of a detour and you’re saying, I just need to hear the GPS tell me that I’m still on the fastest route. Stop asking why and start asking what. What do you want me to know about this? What do you want me to know about you in this? What do you want me to know about me in this? And then what do you want me to do?
It was taught to me a long time ago, about 15 years ago, that the two questions that actually pave the road for maturity and growth and our connection to God are, what are you saying to me today, God? And what do you want me to do? What do you want me to know? What do you want me to do? What do you want me to know? What do you want me to do? What are you saying to me in this? What do you want me to do?
If you want to stay on the fastest, most effective, most transformational route in your life, professionally, personally, ministry wise, career wise, relationally, all of the categories. These are the two questions that we bring to God every day. What do you want me to know about this? What do you want me to do about this? In that, I believe that God can give you what you need right now as far as comfort, as far as strength, as far as encouragement, as far as provision, as far as anything you need, and then give you your next step, not step 86, right? Which is what I’m usually wanting. Okay. Let me know how this is going to end, God. How’s this going to end? Well, we’re not going there. I’m going to tell you what you need to do today. Here is your next step to stay on your fastest route.
And the piece of encouragement I’ll give you with this is it is a chapter in the book, The Death of a Dream. It’s called Woven, Not Wasted. And one of the emotional wrestling matches that you’ll find yourself in when you’re on the detour is the enemy, the accuser, right, will begin to lie to you and he’ll begin to tell you it’s a waste. You wasted that last year. You wasted that last decade, that last relationship, that last career change, that last degree you went after, whatever it is, that was all wasted time. You have wasted your life. That is a lie.
Because the beautiful thing about God is this, is nothing is wasted. The best and the worst. He is an amazing artist. He is amazingly creative and innovative. And what he does is he weaves together the threads of these details in these detours into the tapestry of the vision and the purpose for your life. Everything is woven together. It’s not wasted.
You say, how do you know that, Daron? How can you prove that? Well, I can prove it through the scriptures of the entire Bible. I can prove it through my lived experience that has absolutely blown my mind and given me so much more of an experience to know and rely on the love of God that the things that I look back on and say, there’s no way you could use that, God. Like, I feel like a failure that was a total waste or, you know, you didn’t look out for me. You betrayed me. You let me down, God. This is all just wasted time. The longer I’ve stayed on these detours, knowing that He’s for me, He’s near me, He’s within me, and He’s leading me into His ways and His plan, I’ve come to see, wow, none of that was wasted. You were preparing me. You were discipling me. You were training me to be ready for what was coming. And without those detours, I wouldn’t be able to step into what you have for me now.
Quick episode, but hopefully some powerful truths. When you’re on a detour, know God’s ways are higher than your ways. Know that He is for you in those detours. Know that He is with you and wants to be within you on those detours. Stop asking why and start asking Him what. What do you want me to know about this God? What do you want me to know about me in this God? What do you want me to know about you? And then what do you want me to do?
These are your foundational principles to be able to navigate and to stay engaged on the detours that are coming. They are coming to your life or you’re on them right now. And I think here’s the last thing I want to share with you that is encouraging to me. I think in my life I can get way too enamored and way too caught up in the destination. I want to get to where I think I need to get. I want to accomplish the goal. And then I begin to believe that the destination is really what it’s all about and what I’m beginning to learn in greater capacity, that the destination matters and there is one God is taking us to.
But I think what brings God the greatest joy and us the greatest fulfillment is traveling the detours with Him. He is Emmanuel, God with us. One of the things that unlocked for me that was really great is I think I spent too much of my time being caught up that God was, he was thinking a lot about our final destination. And the point of following Jesus is so you can go to heaven when you die. The final destination. And guess what? It’s secure. It’s locked in when you accept the love and the forgiveness of Jesus in a covenant relationship with Him. Eternity is set up. That is the final destination.
But I don’t live my life just waiting for the final destination. The joy, the hope, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the goodness, the passion of life comes when I realize the whole point is life with him on the detours as we make our way to the final destination. So if you’re on a detour right now, friend, he’s with you in it. He’s not far away from you. He’s for you in it. He’s taking you above. He’s taking you beyond into his ways, into his plan. Stop asking why, start asking what, and enjoy the journey.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast. We’d love to hear from you about your detours. If you have questions, email me, daron@daronearlewine.com. We’d love to respond to you. And once again, I want to thank all of the monthly donors that helped the Daron Earlewine Podcast and everything that Blackbird Mission does, our nonprofit. If you didn’t know that we do all this through a nonprofit, we do. We’re able to make the podcast available and so many of our resources available for free because you want to help people become what they were born to be. And so if you’ve been blessed by the podcast or Spiritual DNA or some of our other resources, we’d love for you to pray about joining us as a monthly partner, or maybe God has blessed you significantly in a financial way. And you’d love to make a one time gift to our nonprofit. You can do so at blackbirdmission.com/give. And I thank you in advance. You give life and ability for us to continue to say yes to all the adventures that God invites us into.
Thanks for downloading this episode. Share it with someone that you know that maybe on a detour needs to hear this truth, needs to hear this encouragement. And until we talk again, remember these three things. God is for you, not against you. He’s near you, not far away. He created you on purpose and for purpose. Appreciate you. Love you guys. Talk to you next time on the Daron Earlewine Podcast.