That convoluted journey you're on will make sense eventually. What seems like an unnecessarily long journey, frought with detours is all for a purpose. Truly, God knows best as the verse above shows crystal clearly.
Many of us feel as though we are going through a desert and have been going through that desert for a while now. It seems others are getting short cuts and we wonder why we aren't. It feels like our journey is longer, harder, more intense, more dramatic 🙄...
Well, as the verse above says, if God is the one leading you, you bet He has a reason for the type of journey you're on. Though the journey may be painful now, trust that it may have been much worse if you took the 'short cut'.
In fact, in this verse, what seemed like a short cut would have ended up being a horrifyingly retrogressive experience if the people lost faith and backtracked into the slavery there were just delivered from out of fear. Not all short cuts are ACTUALLY short cuts.
Persevere in the journey. It makes you stronger, tougher, bolder, it produces chutzpah 😎! Don't quit, don't wish for another's journey, stay in your own lane and trust that what seems like a long journey is actually the short cut. What seems like a long journey is God saving you from a whole world of pain, regret and "had I knowns".
Funny enough, just a few verses after the verse above, Pharoah comes after the people and they freak out and start asking why God brought them out of Egypt to kill them in the desert. So you see why God didn't want them to go through the Philistine country? - They didn't have the heart (yet) to face adversaries. They'd cower in fear and backtrack into enslavement.
Stay strong and keep trusting the process.
“There is a long way which is short and a short way which is long” (Tractate Eruvin 53b)