The Map

A number of years ago, I was driving down a road near my home when the Lord gave me a vision. He showed me a picture of a map. I looked at the map, and I could see where I wanted to go, but as much as I tried, I could not tell where I was. The map was essentially useless to me. Then the Lord spoke to me and said, “You cannot find the way to your destination unless you know where you are.”

OK, God. Very deep... philosophical... but it sounds more like something I would find in a fortune cookie than something I would hear from You. What are You trying to tell me?

He continued. “You cannot know where you are unless you know where you have been.”

Uh, thanks. Are You going anywhere with this, God?

It took me a while to begin to understand what God was saying. I was in a season of struggling with my identity... Who am I? Where am I in life and where is God leading me? Is this all there is to life? Is there nothing better? ... and I felt lost. Not knowing where I was, I began to believe that my dreams, even the call of God on my life, were totally out of reach. I lost hope.

So many Christians would look at someone in my place, so hopeless and depressed, and wonder if they really knew the Lord. Yet I’d been walking with God more than a decade at that point, and working in full-time ministry for most of it. You can believe in God, you can know His Word and have heard time and time again how He came to set us free - that we might live life to the fullest (John 10:10) - and still you can be (as is much of the Church today) completely lost, unable to see the fulfillment of that freedom and fullness in your life.

Modern Christianity is full of quick-fix, cure-all statements that are often thrown at people who are struggling on their journey: Have you prayed about it? ... Let go and let God ... Lay your burden at the feet of Jesus ... This is just a phase you’re going through ... Just give it time, it will pass. 

And some of this is great advice. Certainly prayer and surrender to God are a great start. But if only it were as
easy as it sounds.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Hopefully you clicked on this link because you are one of those people who is looking up, who shares with me this deep sense that there is something
more to life. “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly,” Christ said (John
10:10). There is abundant life to be lived, but first we have to see where we are going.

Continue to Where Are We? ->