The other day I was coming home from a meeting and trying to get home quickly.  My GPS told me to go a way that I knew had ongoing construction delays, and so I defied the GPS and went another way that I knew would bypass the traffic.  Halfway through the bypass, GPS suggested another route, but I stubbornly refused, and kept going my own way.  And then I hit a wall of traffic.  I sat still for about twenty minutes with no real possibility for turning around legally before I was able to return to normal speed (and home 20-30 minutes later!).  Once I finally cleared the backup, I begrudgingly thought, “I always trust my GPS to get me out of binds on the road.  What made me think today that I knew better?!?” 

How many times have I had the exact same experience with God?  I hear a whispering of the Spirit to go another way, and immediately think, “No, that’s a waste of time.  I’ll do it my way.”  I get a nudge from God to take action, and I resist, responding, “I’ve seen how that turns out in the past.  I’ll stay the course.”  Or I hear Jesus speak clearly about a call, and my response is, “No way!  Not today, Jesus.”  In all of those instances, despite my lifelong relationship with God, and despite evidence to the contrary, I think I know better.  I try to keep hold of the reins, instead of listening to the wisdom of God.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  God, or Jesus, or even the Holy Spirit, isn’t like a GPS.  There’s no clear voice telling me what to do, and there’s no follow-up instruction about how to recalculate the route in life.  And while that certainly may be true, equally true is the fact that both tools test our notion of control.  Both invite us to trust they have our best interest in mind.  I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been rerouted by GPS off a major highway with massive delays onto a rural road in the middle of nowhere – praying that GPS knows what it’s doing and will return me to my route. 

Our relationship with God takes some of that blind trust too.  It feels similarly scary at times – almost like falling of a cliff, trusting a safe landing.  But unlike GPS, we only need to look at our scriptural Salvation Narrative, to look at a character like Jonah, or Ruth, or even Peter, to know that God faithfully guides us in the way to go.  Sometimes we jokingly say, “Jesus, take the wheel!”  I wonder where you’ve been refusing to give Jesus the wheel these days, and what fruit you might experience if you relented.