"Gypsy"

DateLine (6/15/05 - Ponce, Puerto Rico)

A couple of weeks ago when Harriett, Kyle and I were on vacation in Italy we had a GPS based navigation system in our rental car. I’m convinced that these devices are the best value for relieving the anxiety and stress of navigating in a strange environment. The little device mounted on the dash would give us a visual location on a map, or give a list of the next 6-8 turns, and even announce turns and twists in advance with a friendly sounding voice. I’m curious why the voices on these things always seem to be female voices. We even nicknamed our little friend “Gypsy” and she did a great job of getting us safely and quickly from location to location.

Gypsy had an interesting feature. If you programmed in a certain destination and asked it to calculate a route from your current location to the desired destination it would ask you if you wanted to simulate the trip. If your response was yes then it would proceed to go through all of the turns on the entire route in rapid fire succession. It was so comforting to know that she already had the entire trip mapped out, step by step.

Now wouldn’t it be nice if God would ask us if we would like to simulate the route from where we currently are in our life until the end of our life. Each step in advance before we’re faced with the reality. The thought of knowing what lies ahead 6 months from now, 1 year from now, 10 years from now, 50 years from now. That would give us such peace of mind and we would have plenty of time to get prepared for big future events. Or would it? No doubt in my mind that our omniscient heavenly Father could provide to us a detailed map of our future life. It’s also been my experience that God does not work this way. I don’t know why but I can imagine if we knew our complete future we might become so preoccupied with some future event(s) that we would be rendered ineffective for today.

My experience is more like the “real-time” mode of Gypsy. Giving us a few turns at a time, calling out when we’re approaching the next turn, warning us when the road forks and we need to get in one lane or the other. It’s our job to listen attentively as He patiently calls out instructions and to have enough faith in the instructions to follow them explicitly and trust God with the future. There was one more neat feature about Gypsy. When I got off course or missed a turn a little message would pop up that indicated that she was re-calculating the route to get me back on course. God is the same way with us. If we occasionally ignore His instructions, God recalculates our course and prepares instructions to get us back on course. The way that we retrieve those instructions is via a prayer of confession. Aren’t you glad that God is on the job as our Master navigator?