Sense Of Direction

As some of my former basketball players will tell you, I can get lost with the best of them! This is from January 1, 2012.

I'm back in Houston after fourteen days on the road. If you've read the past several days, you know I had a wonderful time with my mother's family in Nashville, Arkansas after spending ten days in Kansas with my brothers and their families. Tomorrow is back to school as we have a teacher's in-service. We have some classroom time scheduled in after meetings so I should be ready to go when the kids come back on Tuesday. It's a new semester with every student having a clean slate as far as grades go. Basketball games start for my girls on Thursday with our season ending the last week of the month. It's hard to believe the school year is half over. Christmas comes at a valuable time in more ways than one!

Since my parents passed away, I drive during the holidays because Southwest does not fly to Wichita and because I now possess a better car. The driving this holiday was uneventful; great gas mileage, no snow-sleet-ice on the roads, few traffic issues. However, the last leg of my journey commenced with a detour and I mean that literally. I'm notorious for getting lost while driving so in the past few years, I've come to rely on printed directions courtesy of Mapblast and Mapquest. This trip, I used Bing.com/maps and was able to navigate easily the first legs of my trek. I departed my aunt and uncle's farm, my mother's birthplace, shortly before 6 AM on Friday in a very dense fog. I stopped at the McDonald's in town for breakfast and a check of my e-mail/FACEBOOK. As I prepared to exit McDonald's, I looked at the map/directions and it told me to enter, and I quote, US 278 HWY W which I would follow 24.9 miles to Hope (Home Of President Bill Clinton) and I-30 West. From the outset, it didn't seem right but as I mentioned, there was a heavy fog and the Internet does not make mistakes. However, as you can see in the above map in the extreme southwest corner of the state, Hope is clearly to the east of Nashville. Due to the limited visibility, my speed hovered around twenty mph and I began noticing there were no signs citing the distance to Hope. When I entered the hamlet of Center Point, I stopped at a convenience store and the very kind lady told me I was going the wrong direction and I would have to retrace  my route, still in the fog, to Nashville,  if I wanted to go to Hope. I was grinding my teeth the entire eleven miles back to Point A. The good news was the fog was lifting and the sun was breaking through. Well, at least it was outside. It remained overcast inside my Honda Fit for several more hours.

You know, I don't blame Bing.com/maps for my going the wrong way. I had this feeling that I was covering the same ground as three days previous when I came into Nashville by way of Oklahoma but I kept going until it became painfully obvious I was on the wrong track. I just needed someone to confirm it. In my Bible classes at school, we discuss the concept of repenting as turning around or changing directions. The kids tend to think of it as simply saying I'm sorry but as we mature, we see it encompasses so much more. I changed directions/turned around and headed back on US 278 E ....... but it still took time to get there. I lost about an hour of time but I made it back to Houston safely, and who knows, maybe my mistake saved me from an accident! In Psalms 103 and verse 12, David wrote about forgiveness with these words:
as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.
King David knew that east and west were opposing directions thousands of years ago and he did not even have he advantage of the Internet. It probably would not hurt to pass that information on to Bing.

Applicable quote of the day:

“The Bible does not provide a map for life - only a compass”

Haddon Robinson  God bless, Steve Luke 18:1 www.hawleybooks.com E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com