The Route I Misread

Erin Doom

Sep 9

3 min read

Updated: Sep 22

A scene from the struggle

Commemoration of the Holy & Righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim & Anna

Anno Domini 2026, September 9

Earlier this week, I had an Amazon route scheduled for 5:15.

I got up, got ready, and drove to the station under the impression that it began at 5:15 in the morning. Only after I arrived did I discover that I had misread the offer. The route was scheduled for 5:15 p.m.

Then a 6:45 offer appeared for later that same morning. I considered accepting it. I also considered going home and beginning my work on Podvig. That would not exactly have been laziness. There was more work waiting for me than I have time to do.

But the gym was on my way home. I hadn’t been in a couple of days. I knew I should go.

I really didn’t want to.

The first moment of decision came at the intersection: turn right toward the gym or continue straight to the highway? I might as well turn, I told myself. I could still get home that way.

Then came the second decision: turn into the parking lot or continue west toward home?

Throughout the drive, and even as I pulled into the lot, I was resisting the gym. I could feel myself searching for permission to turn around. Going home to work would have been easy to justify. But beneath all the respectable reasons was the simpler truth: I did not feel like doing the hard thing.

But the gym won. I parked and went inside.

I’m trying to work my way toward the Norwegian 4x4: four sustained high-intensity intervals separated by periods of recovery. I am nowhere near four minutes yet. That morning I did three sets on the stair stepper, one step up from the two I had been doing.

Three intervals. But not three intervals of four minutes. Three sets of ninety seconds each.

It was nothing heroic. It wasn’t even the finished protocol—just the next honest step toward it.

Afterward, I spent fifteen minutes in the sauna. The health benefits of sauna use are crazy—but more on that later in the Podvig Gymnasium.

As I was leaving, a man hollered my name.

He recognized me from the Hall of Men. He had received the two emails I recently sent announcing Podvig. He told me how grateful he was for them.

Then the connections began accumulating.

He works in sales. He had attended Central Christian Church, where I grew up. My father had been one of his youth sponsors and had helped him form a praise-and-worship band. He was the drummer.

Now he is a convert to Orthodoxy.

And we attend the same church.

My father had helped form him when he was young. Years later, he attended the Hall of Men. Now he had encountered the first words sent out from Podvig. And here we were, standing together at the YMCA early in the morning because I had misread an Amazon offer and then resisted the easier choice to go home.

There is a temptation to make too much of moments like this—to tie every loose thread into a neat bow and call it providence.

But there is another temptation too: to move so quickly through our lives that we fail to behold anything at all.

I don’t think that conversation was a reward for going to the gym. God doesn’t owe me a sign because I climbed onto a stair stepper when I didn’t feel like it.

But I wouldn’t have been standing there to receive the encounter if I had obeyed that feeling.

That is part of what practice does. It places us somewhere our inclinations wouldn’t have taken us. It makes us available—to another person, to an unexpected word, perhaps even to the quiet disclosure of something God has been weaving beyond our sight.

Practice. Become. Behold.

Practice was walking through the gym door.

Becoming happened in three ninety-second intervals, while no one was watching and nothing dramatic seemed to be happening.

Beholding came afterward, when someone called my name.

I had driven to the Amazon station because I misread the route.

Perhaps I had another appointment that morning.