show me the way

I've been starting to think through camp messages. (Seeing as it's been 12 years since I've been the speaker - which means anyone who was in 5th grade when I last spoke is now at least 3 years out of high school - it seems to be a good time for me to speak again.) Our theme is 'Lost and Found,' so I have been meditating along those lines.

Well, as I think about myself and my biggest life frustrations, they generally have to do with lostness. Frustration #1 is when I can't find something. I am a man on a mission until it is found. It drives me nuts.

The specific situations that I was thinking of more, however, have to do with driving - and not nuts, but lost. I take pride (warning warning) in knowing where I am going. Ever since I was young on family trips, I was the one who got to read the maps for my dad and be his navigator, because I was good at it.

I'm still pretty good with the whole geography thing. God has brought some situations into my life to teach me lessons, though. Things to say, "Hey boy, cut the pride out, 'cause you don't know where you are. You don't know as much think you do." I can think specifically of a time when our team in Malawi got an SB, because I got us lost in the bush trying to get back from the lake, or when we got lost in Pittsburgh driving back from ATF, or when we followed mapquest perfectly and wound up at the end of a runway for a small county airport in Columbia, SC. Probably the thing that drove me most nuts was that I had others FOLLOWING ME, but I WAS LOST.

Well, I'd been meditating on that thought and just confessing pride (cause it's something easy for me to fall into) and asking God's direction, when I picked up my notebook that I'd been jotting in during my 52-week Bible reading plan (which I've nearly completed some 100 weeks later!), and I found some verses I'd jotted down nearly two years ago:

"Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. For a people shall dwell in Zion, in Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as he hears it, he answers you. And though the Lord give you the bread of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, 'This is the way, walk in it,' when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left." Isaiah 30:18-21

Isn't it SO COOL??? Even when I'm lost, God knows the way. And even when I foolishly think that I'm the one in the lead, I need reminded, I'm just to follow Jesus. As long as I do that, I won't be leading ANYONE astray. He must become greater, I must become less.