Choose Your Rut Carefully

In his book, To Dream Again, Robert Dale tells a favorite story. As numerous wagon trains left St. Joseph, Missouri, during the 1849 gold rush days, for a trip across the prairies which were already rutted by the tracks of earlier wagons, they read this sobering message at the western edge of town, "Choose your rut carefully, you may be in it all the way to California. It seems that we need to be careful about the patterns and habits which we develop in our lives. Patterns such as, attitudes, habits, thought patterns, behaviors, etc. We may be in those patterns or ruts for the rest of our life.