Sometimes we get way off course

Surely, from time to time you have read a news story and thought to yourself, “I can’t believe this really happened.” But it did, and you hope it never happens to you. I read such a story this week. It was reported on Yahoo! News, in the daily newspaper El Mundo, and by other sources.

A 67-year-old woman in Hainault Erquelinnes, Belgium, left home to drive about 90 miles to the train station in Brussels to pick up a friend. She entered her destination address in her GPS and started following directions. On her second day of driving, she found herself 900 miles away in Croatia, not at the train station in Brussels.

Whether she entered the wrong address in the GPS or the device was faulty is not known. Whatever happened, she ended up following a route that took her out of Belgium into Germany, then southeast through Germany, Austria, the northeast corner of Slovenia and into Zagreb, Croatia.

She stopped twice for gas, pulled over to the side of the road for a nap, and even had a minor fender bender accident before fully realizing and accepting that she was headed in the wrong direction. She admitted to having had clues that she was going the wrong way.

The woman told El Mundo, “I was distracted, so I kept driving. I saw all kinds of traffic signs, first in French, then German and finally in Croatian, but I kept driving because I was distracted. Suddenly I appeared in Zagreb and I realized I wasn’t in Belgium anymore.”

If we are honest, most of her would admit that we wonder how the woman could possibly go that many miles and that many hours without realizing she was off track and stopping to get straightened out. Certainly, we wouldn’t do that. Right?

Maybe we wouldn’t do it in our car with our GPS, but some of us might enter wrong information in our spiritual GPS and blindly follow it despite how far off track we get. Just like the woman, we might ignore the many clues along the way and keep on trucking.

If we are oblivious to the clues or choose to ignore them, we can travel a path that clearly leads us away from our faith. If we suspect we have misunderstood our Global Positioning System or have entered wrong information, we check it out. We need to do the same with God’s Positioning System, the Bible. If signs and clues are there that we are off track, the best move is to stop and check our spiritual GPS.