Navigating Life

The advent of GPS Navigation systems certainly changed the way we travel.  I recall some of my earliest experiences with it.

Not long after it became a common tool for automobiles, I went on a trip across Kansas and through Missouri with a feedlot manager calling on some of his customers and doing a couple of producer meetings.  I was fascinated by his TomTom GPS system -- especially when we reached a point where the maps had not been updated to reality.  A new bridge had been put in which we crossed.  On the navigation screen of the TomTom it showed us crossing the river with no highway -- we were offroading it over water.

A few years later I was on a customer prospecting trip in Kentucky with a colleague who worked for the manufacturer of a product we were using.  We headed out of Lexington into the hills of the backwoods part of the state following his Garmin GPS system.  He had plugged in the address of a veterinarian whose clinic was somewhat off the beaten path.

We started out on a major highway and then, following the directions of his Garmin, turned onto a smaller highway which led to a barely paved blacktop which eventually turned to gravel.  After many miles of gravel road we were sent down a smaller gravel road that showed much less travel and eventually turned into a couple of tracks with weeds growing in the middle.  We passed a number of questionable places along the way and a couple of times, thought we heard banjos playing (just kidding).  The road eventually ended at a locked gate.

The Garmin showed we were about 1/2 mile from our destination which lay on the other side of the fenced pasture in front of us.  My faith in the navigation system was somewhat tested on that trip.  We had to backtrack about 30 miles and take a completely different route to get where we were going -- which, by-the-way, was across the pasture from where we had ended up previously.

[As I write this, I suspect I may have related this story previously.]

It seems there is a setting in the GPS system that gives you the option to choose the "shortest route" or the "fastest time" to your destination.  You also can program it to avoid toll roads if you so choose.  Frequently, the shortest route is not the fastest time as we found out in Kentucky.

Anymore, I use Google Maps on my phone.  It is usually up-to-date and I can easily look at optional routes.  Others will argue there are better map software applications, but I haven't found one yet that beats Google's version.

I'm not sure why this came to mind this morning unless it is just a reminder that there are many roads we travel in life.  Sometimes the route to the destination isn't the obvious one -- what appears to be a direct path is often the most difficult and may lead to a dead end.  It also reminds me that we need to trust the Navigator.  Fortunately we have One who is always up-to-date and takes us down the best path to our destination if we will trust Him to do so.

"Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails."  -- Proverbs 19:21