The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right path for his name’s sake.
Psalm 23:1-3 (NLT)
During my lifetime, the tools we use to navigate have changed a lot. As a kid, when our family went on trips, my dad would drive the car down the highway while my mom unfolded a giant map and plotted the shortest and quickest route to our destination. He was the pilot, she was the navigator. Eventually, our glove box full of road maps was replaced by an atlas, which was a book full of maps of every state. We swapped a poster size road map for an oversize book full of them.
Somewhere in the ’90s, the internet helped us find MapQuest (which was an early, clumsy cousin of Google Maps). You would plug in your starting point and your destination and MapQuest would give you a route, which you would then use to print out pages of driving directions. Then along came the GPS for your car, which had to be constantly updated. These days, we all just open an app on our phone or tell it where we want to go, and step-by-step it gets us there. No one gets lost anymore.
One of the great bonuses of swapping our maps for apps is that a GPS has the ability to recalculate. When you miss a turn, change your destination, or when the route changes, you don’t need to buy a new map or print out new directions. Your GPS recalculates the path for you.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a GPS for life? We do. In Psalm 23 (the Lord is my Shepherd psalm), we read that God guides us onto the right path for His name’s sake. Like a shepherd that tracks down a wandering lamb and gets it back to the right place or a friendly voice that recalculates our route and gets us on the right path, the Holy Spirit will guide us when we choose to listen to God wants to say to us. The key for us is what Jesus said in the New Testament. “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me…” (John 10:14). When we listen for His voice, He directs our steps.
What is the most lost you have ever been on a trip? What did you do? When you feel lost in life, who do you listen to as you recalculate?