Time to Find Our Way

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  Anyway, those fold up maps were awesome, well until they changed the roads and your map was out-of-date.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.