The GPS made me do it

Last year, I ended up in Miami for a work trip. I was down there interviewing some plumbing contractors for a story I was writing for my company magazine, and while we were down there it was decided that we needed to rent a vehicle. We ended up with a manly Nissan Versa and my coworker, our videographer, our guide, and I spent a couple of days trying to get ourselves killed in Miami traffic. Fortunately for us, the manly Nissan Versa came with a GPS. But unfortunately, it only spoke Spanish.

One night after we’d had dinner out with some of our Latin American sales team members, we were trying to get back to our hotel, and the GPS (it had decided to speak English for us) got confused. And I mean really confused. The poor thing kept directing us back to the Miami airport, and once we were at the airport, it kept telling us to turn right, turn right, turn right! … But turning right would be turning into the arrival terminal! Not a good place to turn right.  The GPS was obviously glitching out, but the driver had enough common sense not to listen.

I heard a story on the radio yesterday that tourists in Alaska are running into a similar problem. Their GPS systems are giving them directions that send them onto the runway of an Alaskan airport that is clearly marked with signs and fences, and the people are doing what the GPS says in spite of the fact that it’s obviously wrong.

Can you imagine what would have happened if my coworker took the GPS’s word for it and turned our Nissan Versa into the airport terminal? I think we would have gotten in a lot of trouble. People might have gotten hurt. I’m sure we would have gone to jail. And our only reason would be that the GPS told us to do it.

Sometimes I think I’m like a broken GPS system, not because I get easily lost but because I get easily confused and then I stubbornly insist that I’m right even when the truth of my ignorance is staring me right in the face.

Downtown Chicago at night, Chicago, IL

Today’s verse is Isaiah 48:17-18.

This is what the Lord says—
    your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
    who teaches you what is good for you
    and leads you along the paths you should follow.
Oh, that you had listened to my commands!
    Then you would have had peace flowing like a gentle river
    and righteousness rolling over you like waves in the sea.

None of us can trust our own senses or our own understanding of circumstances and situations because we don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. We don’t know what the big picture is supposed to look like. So how on Earth can we know which direction we’re supposed to go when we aren’t even sure where we’re going? That’s why we have the Bible. That’s why God is leading us in the direction He wants us to go, and He expects us to trust Him.

If we trust Him, He brings us peace. If we trust Him to take care of the details, He’ll handle the real problems before we reach them. Everything else we encounter on the road is just an opportunity to get stronger, to grow our faith, and to learn something we didn’t know the day before.

But it’s our choice to trust Him. We don’t have to take His word for it. We can go off and do our own thing, blindly groping in the dark, facing the insecurities and uncertainties we thought we understood. But it won’t be very long before we realize we don’t know as much as we thought we did. We’ll learn soon enough that we’re trying to navigate with a GPS system that isn’t functioning properly, and either we’ll end up more lost than we started out or we’ll crash and burn. Following our own path always ends up one of those two ways.

But God never gets confused. He never gets turned around. He always knows exactly where He’s going and exactly where we need to be, and He’s not about keeping secrets. No, He tells us everything we need to know. And the stuff He doesn’t tell us? Well, we don’t need to know it.

So if you’re tired of getting bad directions, if you’re tired of driving your proverbial Nissan Versa into the proverbial Miami airport, consider a word of friendly advice: ditch the broken GPS. Get directions from somebody who knows where they’re going. You’ll be less frustrated, and you might even learn to enjoy the ride along the way.