I've always loved maps. I mean, I've really loved maps. Some people take a good novel to bed with them at night. I've been known to take an atlas. I can spend hours looking at highways and backroads, studying the names of towns, figuring out how places connect to one another. There's something fascinating to me about seeing the big picture, knowing where you are, where you're going, and all the different ways you might get there.

And that fascination started when I was pretty young. When I was growing up, our family would take long road trips. And we didn't always stop at motels along the way. We would often just drive straight through, taking turns behind the wheel, traveling through the night until we reached our destination. And when it was my mom's turn to drive (which was always the night shift), I became the navigator.

Now, think about that for a moment. Here's a grown woman driving down the highway in the middle of the night, and her navigator is a little kid with a road map - one of those huge folded things about the size of a bedsheet, and one that once unfolded, never truly was folded back the proper way.

Today, of course, we have GPS. We type in our destination, and a nice, pleasant voice tells us where to go. "In half a mile, turn right." "Continue straight for three miles." "Take the next exit." And if you decide you know a better way and therefore ignore the directions, what does it say? "Recalculating." I have been known to actually argue with that voice OUT LOUD!

But here's what I've learned about navigating, whether you're using a paper map or a GPS: Knowing where you want to go doesn't necessarily mean you know the best way to get there. And sometimes the problem isn't that we don't have directions. It's that we don't like the directions we've been given.

We look at the route and think, "This isn't right. This is NOT the right way." But I've found - for the most part - ignoring your GPS makes things inconvenient. But when I do this in my relationship with God, it turns out worse than a little inconvenience. Which brings us to our Scripture today.