I was driving home from a meeting and I was chatting to Tracey on the phone (using the hands free connection of course) when the satnav screen suddenly and unexpectedly went blank. I was pretty sure that I knew where I was going (are all the women reading this thinking ‘Typical man’?) and so I kept chatting rather than hanging up and fixing the problem.
It turned out that I hadn’t plugged the power cable in properly and the battery had run out. When I plugged the cable back in, it led to the satnav bursting into life and it didn’t even utter those infamous words, ‘turn around when possible’. The satnav instantly reconnected to the route (or to what I thought was the correct route) as it told me to carry straight on.
You see, I thought I was on a straight road all the way to the town I was heading toward but it turns out I was wrong. Without any guidance from the satnav I just drove onwards thinking it was the right way and because I was talking I missed the sign to the town I was heading for. Unfortunately the sign was pointing right and not straight on!
The satnav didn’t reconnect until several minutes later, which was around seven minutes after I had driven past where I should have turned right. The satnav did take me home to Colchester, but it was a slightly (only 15 minutes) longer route than I had planned.
Knowing and being sure that you are going the right way is really important.
One of the real ironies about this story was that I did some geocaching on way to my meeting. When you make a long journey, you can never be sure if you will be delayed and so I allowed some extra time knowing that I could search for some geocache near my destination. Geocaching involves using gps to ensure you get to exactly the right spot and I found three relatively quickly in the 15 minutes I had spare. Without a gps device I wouldn’t have found any of them because I would have nothing guiding me to the right place.
Knowing and being sure that you are headed to the right destination is really important.
God promises to guide us but are we listening?
God promises that he is with us always but are we looking to him?
We can go through so much of life on autopilot, simply doing what we have always done before. Even when we switch off autopilot and are focused on what we think is important, there are distractions along the way.
I believe that God will lead us through life but we do have to look to and be led.
How will you live your life today?
Turn around when possible?
Honest about my faith 