Skip to main content

Stubborn Navigation


Over Easter, I visited with my family outside Atlanta.
My first night there, my niece, Scarlett, found a restaurant listed in the phone book that she thought she’d seen.  She decided she’d like to try it for dinner.  I said, “ok, I’ll pull up the address on my phone, and it’ll get us there.”
I found it… the GPS showed it 8 miles from the house.  In my mind, we need only drive two blocks to the main highway and keep going until we got to the restaurant.  I knew just about where the restaurant had to be.
A couple of miles from the house, the little lady in the GPS started talking about turning left…..but based on the address of the restaurant, I knew we needed to continue straight.  I kept telling my bro-in-law Jimmy not to turn left.  She kept recalculating, and with every stop sign or light, the instructions were “turn left.”
Since I was SURE where the restaurant was, we kept motoring straight.  You’re probably ahead of me.  To end this little story, we finally had to turn left, and after zig-zagging around a couple of times, found ourselves at the restaurant.  It was nothing like the place Scarlett had been sure she’d remembered seeing, but we went in and ended up having a nice little dinner with some good ole country cooks.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve insisted many, many, many times on NOT making the turns HE has urged me to make.  Because of my stubbornness, I’ve missed where I needed to be, where He wanted me to go.  Sometimes it takes a while, but when I finally get beyond “I know where this place is…I’m going the right way” and realize I need to tune into Him again, I discover victory…and at times… a good place to “eat”. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God The Modern Father

   These are hard days.  It's tough for ministries.  It's tough for churches.  It's tough for parents.  It's tough for men, and it's tough for women.  It's tough to know who you can trust and who you can't.  It's tough to weed out fact from a preponderance of fiction.  In general, life is hard.    Did you know the Bible promises that life will be hard?  In a recent conversation with Ann about the overall decline of the church... why congregations take off and then systematically shrink and ultimately dissolve... I believe the Lord dropped a relevant truth into my heart.  It's not anything I haven't said before, but it is in a different context.    I'm seeing a trend in making converts without discipleship.  And, in the cases where discipling does take place, I fear there is some error in the teaching which could, in very large part, be responsible for the decline of the American church. ...
3 comments
Read more

Courteous Listening

The act of being courteous takes very little effort. I’m one of the worst to get involved in what is going on at that moment in my life, probably trying to figure it out, fix it, find a solution….you know, MOVE ON WITH IT.  All the while, I frequently miss what’s happening right in front of my face. When we stop and think about it, a lot of us probably come across as disinterested, impatient with, and/or bored by what others are saying.  In politeness we nod, maybe touch an arm as if to say, “I hear you.”  I know a lot of the time we’re sincere, but more often than not, we’re probably thinking about the next thing on our own agenda forgetting what we’ve heard only five minutes later. If I’m thinking about this, the light bulb may be going off in your head, too.  Maybe all of us can put forth a more concerted effort to be effective listeners and be as truly attentive as we try to make people believe we are.
Post a Comment
Read more

No Matter What

Several years ago a friend shared with me that his route to work every day took him through a toll booth....and he tried to always choose a certain booth. This is because the gentleman manning that booth was an elderly man who always had something "bright and sunny" to say to him. Every morning my friend would hear "Have a good day, no matter what!" Now, there were days my friend drove up to that toll booth with zillions of questions in his head of how he was gonna make it through a challenging day that was always before him when he arrived at his workplace. But he just kept those words in his head...and heart..."Have a good day, no matter what". Now, that's a choice, isn't it? "No matter what"???? I don't know about you, but I honestly don't find that coming naturally to me...it's a struggle to find sunshine on those cloudy, dreary mornings...'cause it just doesn't show up in my eyesight. But, that's w...
3 comments
Read more