I wonder how many of you remember those fold-up maps we used
to get for free in the gas stations. I
used to have about six of them stuffed in my glove compartment. How many of you remember the term, “glove
compartment”? Anyway, those fold up maps
were awesome, well until they changed the roads and your map was out-of-date. Of course, printed maps are pretty much
extinct, in favor of our GPS systems.
Even those sometimes aren’t perfect.
Recently my family and I were returning from Florida and were rerouted
off of I-95 due to an accident. Well,
the GPS worked fine util the satellite feed got lost! You see we are always looking for direction
and the reality is we are always depending on guidance.
That guidance off course is what those wise men were searching
for. Their wisdom came, most obviously,
in the fact, that they knew they needed direction. They were following a star because, of course,
that was the GPS system of those days, but ultimately, they knew the ultimate
direction they needed would come from the newborn king.
Perhaps that’s our problem today, we realize we are lost and
yet, either we don’t want to look for direction, believing we know the way and
our way will get us where we need to go, or we have forgotten where to go for
that direction. In these most tumultuous
of times, there clearly is a need for direction. Our way, our own directions, seem to be
leading us down one dead-end after another.
We all seem so determined that our way is the right way, and everyone else
is wrong. We feel that because we did a Google
search for something on the Internet, then it must be the truth, and even the
ultimate Truth.
And yet the places where we find the ultimate direction are
empty. In general, our church pews and
our other places of worship are all relatively empty. Oh, we might like the convenience and new-found
safety of livestreaming, but we seem to have lost the desire to be back in
community. I wonder how many homes today
have a bible, and I don’t mean the nice one given at the time of a wedding and
is now locked in an attic somewhere. For
so long now, in our society, we have misunderstood freedom of religion to mean freedom
from religion. Our ideas, our solutions,
never seem to come from the almighty Truth.
We make the truth of our own making.
We find ourselves off the interstate and instead of trying to get the
GPS to work, we determine that we know the way.
And so we drive in circles and circles, remaining lost, often bumping
into others who are just going their own ways.
As this New Year begins, let us resolve, to let go of our
own individual truths, of our own individual ways. Let us look for the ultimate direction, the
ultimate truth, the way found in the newborn king. The wise men got it. It is time we become wise as well.
Happy and Healthy New Year.
