All of us have been lost at some point in life. Years ago, my wife and I travelled to the Los Angeles area to visit Disneyland with our young children. This was during a time when GPS, MapQuest, and the like, were not yet available. In other words, we would need a regular map to help us find our destination. As luck would have it, we were off course on a terribly busy freeway.

I asked my wife to retrieve the map from our glovebox, open it, and tell me where I needed to go. As she fumbled through the map reading, time continued to pass. Had it not been for the Pacific Ocean, we would probably still be moving toward Hawaii.

With increasing frustration at my wife’s struggle with the directions and me in the pilot’s seat attempting to navigate through a sea of automobiles, I crossly barked at her saying, “Don’t you even know how to read a map?” At this, she glaringly cut me with a stare, folded the map back up, placed it in the glovebox, and did not speak to me for at least an hour.

This is not an article on how speak with loving kindness to your spouse, although maybe it should be.  And it is not about my wife telling me where to go, absent a map, if you get my drift. It is about being spiritually lost.

Every person, I believe, has an innate divine compass inside them that they often ignore. It can direct one to the shores of altruism, morality, ethics, and nobility, if they listen to it or the reverse if ignored. Have you ever missed your GPS destination point and had the technology growl at you to turn around? If so, then you may understand when I say, maps do not do well to being ignored.

Still, we have a choice. We can pridefully assure ourselves that we will be fine on our own and not need direction or we can type-in the coordinates to help us get where we want to go. Fortunately, many resources are available to us today as maps.

When it comes to the idea of faith, no one should blindly believe anything. If we trust the GPS technology available to get us to an earthly destination, there must be a map of sorts that leads to spiritual realities, too. The directions may take us a way we did not expect, or we may ignore them altogether, but they will show the way if you study them in advance.

As a pastor, my interest is to encourage you to travel well in this life. To do so, requires faith in the spiritual map. Open your bible this week and assume you spiritually have somewhere to be that you need direction. See for yourself if it is trustworthy for the eternal road ahead.

Kent Simmons is the pastor of Canyon Community Church in Kingman, AZ. He can be reached at kent@canyon-church.com.