Clay in the Hands

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with a few of our boys from church out at Plains Baptist Assembly.  They are there for a boys camp for a few days.  I was able to go from station to station with a couple of them – hearing camp staffers teach on tool safety, archery, first aid, sling shots and compass and maps.  You know – manly things!

It was great to just hang out with them for a couple of hours – even in the heat.

One of the foundational aspects with each station is that regardless of the topic, the staffer closed his lesson with some spiritual application.  The station at which the application came through the most clearly was compass and maps.  As I watched the boys trying to manipulate their compass to get the reading they needed, the one thing that we had to continually remind them of was that the needle always points north.  They were each given a heading or degree to set on their compass and then told to move toward the area of the field that corresponded to the heading on their compass.  It was fun to watch them try and make the compass say what they wanted it to say.

The key is always in the alignment.  The compass needle will always point north.  We can try to turn the compass but the needle will always point north.  The key is not aligning the compass to our direction – the key is aligning ourselves with the compass.

This is very true on our life journey as well.  We can take our compass – the Bible – and try and turn it to fit where we think we need to go, but when we do, we end up places we don’t need to be.  We must always align ourselves with the compass and not the other way around.

How closely aligned are you with your compass today?

Last week on our trip, we rented a car to be able to get around in the DC area and then to travel to New York City.  The car came equipped with a talking GPS device to assist in finding our way to where we wanted to go.  I am sure that many of you have used GPS as well.  One of the things that drove me crazy with the particular device mounted in our car was the inability to zoom out on the map to get a big picture of where we needed to go.

I have always been pretty good with directions.  As long as I can look at a map and get my bearings, then I can usually find where we need to go.  But the key for me is having the ability to see the bigger picture.  When we are able to see the bigger picture and we know our objective, we often find that there are multiple ways to get where we want to go.  If we set out on our journey and hit a road block, we are not dead in the water – we can adjust and keep moving.  But if we are tied to a 1/4 mile view of where we are going, we are limited to following the path laid out for us (which is not always the best way, and in a few cases last week, wasn’t even the correct way).

There are many, many similarities in this experience to our spiritual journey.  In many ways, if we live by faith, we cannot see too far down the road to know exactly what is coming our way – in essence, living with a 1/4 mile perspective.  We can only live into the moment and move forward.  But take heart, we have the Bible to serve as our map and to help give us a bigger picture of where we are going and how to get there.  We know that our objective or purpose as followers in The Way is to live our lives to honor God.  That is where we are going – our goal and objective.  The path we take is one lived out in faith.

Will we take wrong turns along the way?  Sure, but as long as we remember the bigger picture, we can get back on track and continue to move forward.  The key is to study the map and refer back to it often.

May your journey be rewarding today!

Now where did I put that map?