Reflection This Week
OUR GPS

    Two years ago our daughter Autumn was in need of a new car. Her old one was costing her too much in upkeep and she really was not safe driving the Interstates around Baltimore and Washington, D.C. She called and asked my fatherly advice. Since she was, and still is, single, had a good job and could afford it, I told her to go for it and get the car she really wanted. It was a Honda Accord with all the bells and whistles, including a GPS navigation system.

    About two weeks after she purchased her new car, she was on the way to work and received a cell phone call from her sister Tracy who told her that there was an accident ahead and that she should take an alternate route. She did and she got lost. She called Tracy and asked for help. Tracy reminded her that she had a navigation system in her car and if she would just program her work address into it, she would not be lost any more. She arrived at work ten minutes later, and, yes, Autumn is a blond.

    Sometimes we all get lost. And sometimes we think we cannot get “there” from “here”. Yet, the truth is that we can always get there from here, wherever that "there" is that we want to get to from “here”. Sometimes the journey is long and difficult; sometimes it is short and difficult; sometimes it is long or short and reactively easy. But no matter what, we can get there from here, with our without a GPS navigation system.

    We can get there from here no matter what those journeys may be, physical or spiritual, because God’s Spirit lives in and works through us. The spiritual journeys, of course, always seem more difficult because they always tend to be rather nebulous. Asking God to heal a cancer is an easy miracle to request. Asking God to heal a family relationship that is convoluted with many hard-to-dissect facets is something else again. Yet God works miracles because God works in God’s own ways. With God's help we can always get there from here.

    Yet, again, the main problem we find in our spiritual journey is not just that the “there” we want to get to is so often difficult to define. Once we get there, anywhere, somewhere from here, once we get to where we want to be, the journey is not over. It only begins again. The “there” we want to get to from “here” only becomes a “here” from which we set out on another journey.

    Autumn finally arrived at work. She got there from wherever she was. But Kelly Associates where she works was not the final stop in her journey. She had to leave there and return home. And once there, she had to begin another journey to some other there. We all do.

    So often, I think, most of us, or at least too many of us, once we get to “there” from “here”, think we have arrived. We take off our shoes, unpack our bags, and get on with life. We believe our journey, our pilgrimage, is over. It is not. It never is. For as soon as we begin to believe that we have come to the end of our journey, that we have finally arrived, we begin to die, literally, figuratively, honest-to-godly.

    God’s Spirit protects us from being lost and helps direct us to where we need to go from here. Yet, like Autumn lost in Baltimore if we do not plug into our GPS system, we will remain lost. If and when we do plug in tune in, listen in, God will help us find our way.         WJP