It's Not Life's 'Instruction Manual'...

...It's the Uplink for the GPS!


Following Little North Mountain.

A friend recently remarked that: "Life does have an instruction manual, its called the Bible." This is true. I suspect most of us do use the Bible exactly like an instruction manual.

Think about the instruction manuals for most of your appliances. You skip over the verbose warnings at the beginning that essentially tell you how the device can kill you if you use it while standing in water or something like that. Company lawyers spend a lot of time writing these warnings to protect the company from your lawsuit. We all know that.

You dive right in to the 'quick start' page. How about a few proverbs to get you going in the right direction. Or, you do the manly thing and attempt to assemble the device without looking at the directions. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.

Now the book, with all its wisdom tucked throughout, finds its way to a drawer in your kitchen. There it stays until the device malfunctions or you need to replace a part.

You refer to it regularly but somehow you miss learning a lot of features that will enhance your life.

We invited a couple [young people] out to our house recently and I began to spell out the driving directions when the wife said: "I just need your address, we've got GPS." The cool thing about GPS is that you actually use it every day and you expect it to take you where you need to go.

You learn to depend on GPS for solid practical guidance. Millions of American men who'd never STOP and ask directions happily listen to the female voice in their car that tells them each turn to make. Is this a great country or what???

But one needs to learn a few things about GPS, just as one needs to learn about the Bible.

The GPS can give you excellent directions over a road that it does not know to be closed. This Winter I hiked on the snow covered Blue Ridge Parkway to the Mountain Farm and back. When I returned to my car at the end of the plowed Howardsville Turnpike I was met by a woman who insisted that her GPS said she could get to Wintergreen this way.

I spread my arm toward the snowy parkway... "not today, m'am." It was possible to WALK to Wintergreen that way but her SUV wouldn't get through the 2' drifts.

I then proceeded to give her step by step directions to Wintergreen through Nellysford. "When you get to route 6 you can reset your GPS and it will take you right there." She thanked me and drove off with her SUV full of kids anticipating a day at the slopes.

So have I shot my analogy? I think not. Scripture gives us clear directions in many things but it assumes that we will be observant of our situation and request additional information when we need it.' Live Help' is always available and essential. Some old Saints will refer to this as walking in the Spirit. Indeed the Spirit is known as 'Comforter' and 'Counselor' for a reason.

We read about people in the Bible like Enoch, who "walked with G-d," but do we study modern examples like George Müller, whom G-d used to minister to orphans through faith, or R. G. LeTourneau, who cleared his mind by going to G-d in prayer and solved incredible engineering problems through faith.

People who have learned that they can reach out and touch G-d!

I recently began a project working with a young artist to create a mural for the children of our church. She was thrilled that we were creating something that actually invited the children to touch the artwork. I think she found something profound here. How often do we think of G-d, that Master Artist, as beyond our reach. We sort of go through life shooting up a prayer or two... going to the 'quick start' menu when life has us totally confused, but missing the joy of living in constant contact with our Creator. Our message as a church needs to be "please touch."

And GPS only works when it can connect with the satelite, you know.