Tracks In The Dust

Looking for Life’s GPS

The other day I was driving to some places I had never been before and taking some guests around our huge metro area. So I brought out the GPS device. Global satellite positioning means that this little screen can always tell where you are on the face of the Earth, and help you by providing the directions needed to reach your final destination. It’s amazing that so many years ago that concept would have been some sort of “space age” future miracle you would see in sci-fi movies.

Now it is a reality that is entirely possible and can show up on your handheld smartphone or sit neatly on your dashboard wherever you go. And announce what turns and lanes you should be in. Wow.

It would be nice if our lives had a device for reaching our goals and destinations in life. We could just type in where we wanted to end up, and let the life-GPS just program it. It would talk to you, just like the GPS’s do today. Part of the features of the GPS lets you know when you get “off course” by announcing “recalculating your route” adjusting your course and helping you get turned around the right way.

Often in life we get off course, and there just isn’t that convenient GPS in our pocket to turn our lives back on course. The course corrections are ours to make, sometimes with guidance from others around us. The people we trust, the people we admire or sometimes from those who have alternative motivations that may not be the best course.  We may get lost because we get distracted. In my GPS for the car, you can program “attractions” along the way, but in our lives some of those are more interesting than others, and in other cases they are indeed “distractions” rather than attractions, although we may be drawn to them.

So what course do we program into our life’s GPS? How well would we listen to the instructions it would speak out to us. Would we ignore it? It could sit on our dashboard and tell us when we made a wrong turn to our final goal. Of course we could end up with detours, and construction or accidents that may slow our lives course down. But the GPS would just recalculate. Funny.

But we don’t have a GPS for our lives here on Earth. There is nothing we can program. We have to rely on our family and friends and importantly our spiritual leaders that will provide us the feedback we need to make corrections when things go astray. Sure we can just wander like nomads on the map, in hope of getting where we think we want to be, but in the end we have to keep our eyes and ears open to where we are going and who we are listening to.

But we also have to keep our hearts and minds open to God and his plan.  Without it we may be recalcuating in circles that eventually get us lost. For many of us, we so much want to stay “on the map” and headed in the proper direction. In the end it will lead to the best destination we could all want.  It starts by programming it in… go ahead. You can do it.