from Parablelife:
Hearing eyes, seeing ears: Adventures in traveling without a map
How difficult could this be?
"You guys, we've got to do a quick run to the post office. This shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes max," I told my three school-age kids. "This'll give us a chance to take a quick peek at our new home town. Grab your coats."
Our family had relocated from Chicago to Waukesha, a small city near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just three days earlier. We jumped into our beat-up van, and I paused to study the city map so I could figure out where we were going. The post office, located near the center of town, was located in a spaghetti bowl of random, crazily plotted streets. The effect was as if someone had taken the scribblings of an angry toddler and decided that one of the crazed crayon drawings would make an ideal layout for the streets of a city. For a nervous moment, I wondered if this trip would be quite as simple as I'd billed it, but reminded myself that I was a veteran Chicago driver, navigating the streets of that city like a cabbie. Find my way around a burg like Waukesha would be a cinch.
A frustrating half hour later, ten-year old Ben had taken on the role of our tour guide. "Hey, Mom, didn't we drive by this vet's office twice already? And look, it's the motorcycle place again. Those are cool dirt bikes. I want a dirt bike for my next birthday." The other two kids chimed in with their own observations. "Can we stop at that Hardee's the next time we drive by it and get some fries?"
I responded by words said by lost drivers everywhere when they're not quite ready to admit it yet: "I'm sure we're almost there." I muttered under my breath, "How difficult could this be?" as I swiped for the now-rumpled map again, hoping that when I looked at it this time, it would miraculously make sense. It hadn't on any of our six previous circuits through the labyrinth of streets. It didn't this time, either. Ready to admit defeat, I pulled into the parking lot next to the vet's office to try to get my bearings.
Ben asked pointedly, "Are we lost?"
I told him, no, we weren't exactly lost, but apparently, someone had misplaced the post office. I flagged down a passer-by and asked him for directions. The man laughed wickedly and said, "Oh, you can't get there from here." He then launched into a series of directions so complicated that only a civil engineer could understand them. I gamely asked a couple of questions, trying to clarify. The man seemed to believe that I understood what to do next, and left me with these ominous words: "Yeah, Waukesha's streets are crazy, but it was worse when these was all one way streets down here. It's better since they turned most of 'em into two-way streets a coupla years ago."
Better? I couldn't imagine how these streets could have been even more confusing. I smiled weakly, thanked him for the help he thought he gave me, and dove back into the spaghetti bowl. A couple of hot tears of frustration spilled down my face.
It had gotten really, really quiet in the back seat. I glanced in my rearview mirror and realized the kids were watching me with the kind of intense concern that told me that maybe this trip was about more than just mailing a package and buying some stamps. They needed to know that we'd all learn together how to navigate life in this strange new place.
I needed to know the same thing.
I bit my lip, forced my tears back inside of me, and smiled weakly. "O.K., we're a little lost, and it's more than a little frustrating. I know that there's a basic law of physics that says that matter doesn't disappear into thin air," I told them. "It just changes form. Maybe the post office has turned into a pumpkin or birdhouse or something."
It was a stupid joke, but it was enough to cut the tension, and a couple of them giggled. A couple minutes later, I stopped a lady outside the Hardee's we'd managed to find for the seventh time. She gave me another set of unintelligible directions.
I admitted defeat and accidentally figured out how to get back to our new home. I never found the post office that day. How difficult could this be?
Later, I learned that I'd driven past it at least two or three times, but was so disoriented from doing circuits around the tangle of streets that I'd lost sight of what I was searching for.
For a long time, I've felt like I'm reliving that frustrating trip round and round Waukesha when it comes to my life as a follower of Jesus. I've been a part of a variety of different Christian faith communities ranging from hardcore fundamentalist to freestyle Charismatic to old school liturgical to pop evangelical. I've tried to use the helpful maps that various expert tour guides have handed me with the promise of a less messy journey through life: sermons, books, small group Bible studies and lots of confident-sounding advice.
But I keep looping past the same scenery again and again... and again... like I've been belted into a slow-moving centrifuge. How did the colorful maps and helpful direction-givers become a substitute for following the One who promised to be my straight, narrow path, leading me home?
Jesus could have chosen to give his followers a map showing the path from here to eternity that would have offered us a nice, neat shortcut straight through the complex tangle of life.
Instead, all He says is, "Follow Me".
Other Samples
Uprooted: Growing a parable life from the inside out (FaithWalk). Click to order.
Sample chapter 3 from Uprooted.
"Planted: Expelled"
