I always thought it's really sad that essentially everybody who hasn't later try to look it up, is stuck with the phrase "electricity takes the shortest path". It's entirely and patently wrong. As you say, current goes through all paths, but to varying degrees, depending how easy it is to get through. Many times the long path is also the more difficult path and thus the majority of the current goes through the shortest path, but for example the lightning rod is decidedly not the shortest path. It simply is, by a wide margin, the easiest, so almost all current goes through it.