GPS and U-TURNS

If you’ve tried using a GPS system, you know how it keeps trying to get you to turn back when you don’t follow the intended path.

Oh, that we could just as easily purchase a “God Positioning System” to let us know when we are headed in the wrong direction in daily living. This is what I was thinking as I snapped a picture of this “Wrong Way” sign last weekend.

I hope I’ve done a good job of keeping my kids in tune with their own internal God-Positioning-Systems. It’s typically human that when we are using a GPS (either version), we still make wrong turns and elect to ignore the advice given, certain that we know a better way or a shortcut.

The whole idea of being able to flash up that WRONG WAY sign whenever we or others are headed on a less than desirable path is appealing. I think about a time when I was in my late teen years and my older sister proclaimed, “MJ, I wish I could keep you from making mistakes, but I realize your mistakes are your growth.”

Even with a God-Positioning-System, we are given the freedom to decide whether we choose to listen or not and when we head out in the wrong direction, only to find out we made a mistake, it’s such a gift to be reminded, “God allows u-turns.” And because God is good, when we offer up our mistakes to him, he allows our mistakes to become our growth.

I long to put the experience of 50 years at once into your young lives, to give you at once the key of that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers, but you must work for these inward treasures yourselves.
~Harriet Beecher Stowe