BY Gina Caswell Kelly
Do you remember traveling when you were a kid, or even as an adult, and grabbing all the right maps you needed for where you were going? You could go to the service stations and get maps, usually for free. We had a drawer full of maps from all the places we had been or were going. I even remember in fourth grade, my teacher giving us all a map of Texas and then teaching us how to fold it! Folding a map correctly was a thing of beauty! Then we started being able to buy this thing called an “Atlas.” It was the entire country in a book! The map drawer became obsolete as we relied on the atlas to get us where we were going.
Fast forward a few years. Now we rely on our phones to get us where we need to go. Just put in your destination and hit direction and start. Boom! You are off to the races. We trust the directions to be reliable. We turn in 500 feet just like the voice tells us to do. We trust that if the unnamed voice says we will reach our destination in 47 minutes, we will do just that. We don’t even know who mapped it out. We don’t know anything about who is guiding our path. We just trust them and go.
If we are so trusting of a map, or a voice that has just mapped a route out for us, then why do we have so little trust in the One who knew the road long before we were even born? Why do we blindly trust a little five inch screen and a voice that surely doesn’t sound like she’s from around here, and we won’t trust the Savior with the path ahead of us! It just doesn’t seem very smart to me.
I am a good map reader. My daddy would hand the map to me when we traveled even when I was still in elementary school. I just had that knack. But, if I had questions about it, I would hand it back over to Daddy. I was smart enough to know that at 10, I might not yet know everything. But, in my life, handing the map to God is not nearly as easy. What if He takes me in some area I don’t want to go? What if He takes me places where the food is not to my liking, or the people look different? What if He takes me some place that scares me just a little? Maybe I don’t want to go to any of those places!
God mapped out our road before we were even thought about here on earth. He knew the dangers and twists and turns on the road before we had ever taken our first steps. It makes absolutely zero sense to not trust the Savior with guiding our steps! He knows what lies ahead. He knows what is going on around the corner where we can’t even see. And, He is with us all the way!
Psalm 139 is such a beautiful passage about how God knows us and has known us.“Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In Your book were written every one of the days that were formed for me, when none had yet been lived.”(Psalm 139:16)
Trust the roadmap of your life with the One who wrote the days before you had ever even breathed one breath. Trust you life to the Savior! It will make a difference!
