Sometimes it doesn’t take much to derail us from our plans. A sobering phone call. An illness. A job change. Some of life’s obstacles smash into our path like a tumbling boulder while others bother us incessantly like a pebble in our shoe.

Living in the Colorado Rockies, I understand rockblocks. Hey, Look out! A few years a back, a seventeen-mile stretch of the state’s main east-west interstate was closed when roughly twenty boulders—one weighing sixty-six tons (that’s 132,000 pounds)—tore massive holes in the pavement.

No one was injured, but the shortest detour added about two hundred miles around the perilous rockslide. In our own day-to-day circumstances, few of us appreciate inconvenience and life’s long way around.

Maybe you’re dealing with a colossal boulder in your life right now. Or you are worn out from a trail of a million pebbles. No matter how rugged your journey, you never soldier on alone.

When it comes to personal roadblocks, the Rock of Ages is rock solid in taking us around, over, or through them. “From the ends of the earth I call to you, I call as my heart grows faint; lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalm 61:2, NIV).

What a relief to know that God can literally move heaven and earth on our behalf . . . or just that one annoying pebble.