On May 16th
of this year, on our way back from a week in New York, Michelle and I decided
to stop in Baltimore and visit their zoo, which we’d been told had a brand new
and rather spectacular penguin habitat. Because penguins are my favorite
creature, followed closely by cats, lemurs, giraffes, hippos, dogs, horses,
meerkats, tree kangaroos and nearly every other creature in the class Mammalia,
this was a must see.
We started
out from the hotel and followed Samantha’s instructions and wound up driving
through just about the worst area I have ever been in. On one street corner it
was amazing to see that someone was actually living in a structure (term used
loosely). After coming to a stop at another, Michelle asked me if I’d seen the
man in handcuffs being led up the stairs of an apartment. I looked in my rear-view mirror and decided that running a stop sign might be argued in court
as ‘justifiable’. And there were dealers on *nearly* every corner. Not car
dealers.
This area
the GPS was taking us through was NOT safe by any stretch of the imagination
and back at the hotel, I googled “locations of Baltimore riots”. As I studied
the map and placed remembered street names, stores and parks with what I was
seeing on the computer, I turned to Michelle and said, “Do you remember that
intersection that had this, that and the other?” After receiving confirmation I
said, “Yeah, well… A couple of weeks ago there may have been a big fight there?
Maybe a burnt out drugstore at the next one up?” Yes. That one.
The next
morning, on our way out of town, I asked her if she wanted to drive by Edgar
Allan Poe’s house. She asked where it was and I said, “Good question.” So I asked
Samantha. When I saw the route… we declined and decided that driving on the
Capitol Beltway in DC was more to our liking… where we promptly got stuck and
sat for three hours.
It’s easy to
think of God as our GPS. It’s also easy to wonder why He seems to lead us where
we really don’t want to go, and had we known how he was going to get us there,
we never would have chosen that route and tried to press the “find alternate
route” button. And when we *do* get to where we’re going, why is it that the
end-destination sometimes just doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble it took to
get there? Don’t get me wrong; the penguin habitat was amazing – the rest of
the zoo… meh.
For
everything there is a reason. Perhaps it’s simply that taking the route we
consider to be a “bad” one, is the shortest distance between two points. God
gets us where He wants us faster, because He needs us there on His time… not
ours. And while maybe we think a route is shorter… He knows it’s not. Perhaps
it’s that there are things along that route that He wants us to slow down and
see and absorb, as much as we want to speed up, run some stop signs (and some
red lights), so that we can be changed in Him. Sometimes when we have
inclination to go one place and He wants us to go elsewhere, when we change our
direction, He lets us know we shouldn’t have. And just maybe He even gets us
“lost” every now and then so that we can find the way back home by whatever
means necessary; pressing “find alternate route”, phoning a friend, or
consulting a different map, or just driving until you come to something
familiar, are all ways to rely on Him.
Heather Eddy is the Assistant
Director of Christian Education here at Sardis. When
she is not working with the Sardis children’s programs or assisting the
Fellowship Committee, she spends time teaching Anatomy and Physiology
to pre-Nursing college students and CPR to anyone who cares to know it,
traveling to and from the Big Apple where her best friend Michelle
currently resides and attempting to train her cats.
