NOTE (1/12/18): We’re all learning and growing.  Some of the stuff I’ve written in these old posts may no longer be exactly what I believe or think, or at least may not be articulated the way I’d do it nowadays.  I preserve them in an attempt it to be transparent about my journey, and in the hopes that readers may still glean some insight from the core ideas found here.  Thanks for journeying with me!

So you’re road tripping to El Paso with your older brother, and along the way you both realize you’ve got a craving for some Bob’s Chill Grillburgers. You’re the navigator, but your brother has been in this part of the state before and thinks he remembers where there’s a location. So you get off the highway and starts putzing around the streets. He seems pretty confident, until after a few turns you both suddenly realize that you’re in an abandoned industrial park with some unfriendly-looking canines staring you down. Not to be deterred, your brother continues to putz, with you silently wondering why he doesn’t just use the GPS. Those Choco-Bacon Pancake Burgers are sounding mighty fine to you right now, so eventually you turn on the GPS yourself and punch it in yourself. Turns out, those deep-fried glory nuggets are on the opposite side of town. You point this out to your brother, and ask if he wants you to give him GPS navigation instructions. He agrees. So without wasting another famished minute, you tell him to turn right.

Aside from the fact that you wasted precious minutes apart from your fat-infused fantasy, you most likely have deeper reasons for sadness.  Because without saying a word, your brother has demonstrated that he doesn’t trust you. Sure, he asked you for help, but then didn’t actually take it. Sure, he gave you the GPS back, but as far as you know, he’ll just snatch it from you again whenever he actually wants help again.  You could have all the directional power in the world, but it will be of no value to him as long as he doesn’t give you a chance.  Your brother may still make it to the destination eventually, but you gotta ask, what’s more important? The destination, or the relationship with the guy you signed up to be with the whole way?

An old standby says, “It’s about the journey, not the destination”.  I’d like to take that a step in a different direction.  What if we didn’t think of the destination of life as a career, a spouse, or bacon-induced comas?  If those are the kinds of goals you’ve set for your life, hey – those can be great, but what happens when you get there?  Are you just gonna enter in new GPS coordinates for somewhere else and keep going?  Seems to not be eternally satisfying.

I’d like to propose that our life’s destination is not a location, it’s a relationship – a relationship with God.  He’s the only one that really is eternally satisfying anyways, and anyways, He also has some pretty great apps to help us get places without us trying to manhandle everything.  So…are you being an cranky road trip partner?  Complaining on the road?  Worrying constantly about whether you know where you’re going?  Musing over how much you hate the terrain you’re on now?  Trying to get God to give you all 50 directions at once (as if you can remember them all anyways)?

Let me clarify: if you don’t have a clue where you’re going, hey – you should ask God to show you, it’s not like He randomly just hides stuff from you.  God hides things for us, not from us (Check out Proverbs 25:2).  My point is, if we signed up to have God lead the way for us, let’s actually follow up on it.  Let’s partner with Him. He made us for that, and He loves it. He created us for His glory (Isaiah 43:7), and has better ideas for our lives than we ourselves do.  And in the end, His idea of eternal life is this – simply that we might know Him (John 17:3).  Nothing there about money, careers, relationships. If we don’t keep a relationship as the center of our lives, we’re going to end up worshipping false idols and not going to end up happy anyways.  And hey, God’s giving us a pretty great deal – you’re not only happy when you reach your destination, but you’re pumped the whole way there as well!

No matter what road we’re headed on, let’s keep our relationship with God at the helm.  Because that precious relationship in itself will always be our destination!