Keeping Your Maps Up-to-Date
Image by Alexander Baxevanis
Imagine you were given an assignment… drive from New York, NY, to Los Angeles, CA. Provided that you had a decent running vehicle, good tires and money for gas in the tank, you’d likely accomplish the task easily.
What if I told you that there were a few limitations…
- You couldn’t use a GPS
- You weren’t allowed to access the Internet in any manner - either before the journey or while you were on the road - to determine where you were or where you were going
- You were given a road map… from sixty years ago
Could you finish the task? Probably. How much more difficult and time-consuming would the process be?
There would be obvious limitations - the greatest of which would be no reference to the American Interstate system, whose construction began shortly after your map was produced.
Life is similar.
In Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality, Dr. Henry Cloud talks about how each of us has an internal map that we’re using to navigate our lives on a daily basis. It’s built largely based on our own experiences (what we’ve seen/done/learned) and the experiences of others close to us (who’ve seen/done/learned things we haven’t).
Our road maps are never fully up-to-date, though, because we’ve never learned enough or have enough people surrounding us who’ve experienced everything. We must be willing to keep our maps up-to-date.
Andy Stanley speaks about this in The Principle of the Path:
Imagine the dead-ends and regrets we could avoid if we took our cues from the right people. ...
Successful people aren’t successful because they know everything they needed to know. They are successful because they were willing to apply the lessons they learned from others.
How do we keep our maps up-to-date, then? According to Dr. Cloud, it’s a two-step process:
- Being willing to take it in (Assimilation) - We can’t stubbornly think we know it all, or be afraid or too prideful to be open to new information. It’s okay to be wrong, especially if we’re wrong based on being ill-informed or inexperienced. We must be open to information from others who have experienced parts of life we haven’t yet.
- Making room for it (Accommodation) - Just as you’d make room for a new baby in your family’s life, you must make room for the new information. Information gained stops short of where we ultimately need to be - we must accommodate it into our lives in a way that affects how we live from that moment on.
What are you doing on a consistent basis to keep your maps up-to-date?
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What Are Thin Places?
"Thin Places" are rich in Celtic tradition. They are the places in our lives where the divine and the natural worlds come so close together that we can catch a glimpse of God. For the Celtics these places were very real - places within creation where we could physically go. The Thin Places in our own lives are those moments where the space between us & the Kingdom is thin, when we are introduced to a greater glimpse of Who He is through our experiences and through the stories of others.
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Steven Heicher shared their voice on 07.24.2009:
Unlike some, I have a strong sense of how the US Highway System works (like how I live just off US-70). I know if I run east on that, I’ll eventually run into US-127, which takes me up to Lansing, MI. Of course, 60 years ago, much of that used to be US-27 in Michigan and Indiana. Aside from a few relatively small changes, nothing has really changed about it, and at the same time, I don’t rely on GPS (it’s only recently that I got one, and that’s because my Blackberry has one built-in, and I don’t use it).
Craig Webb, one of the pastors at my church, has twice given his sermon on how it’s about your direction, and not your intention, in regards to your path. The first time, he did a pretty good cover of “Party like a Rock Star”. But, it’s not really about your destination or your intentions, but your direction. Using your example, while I know how to get to my destination without relying on the Interstate, I’m not just going to take any US Highway to get there, or even really rely on state highways, either, because they can be confusing (as from your time in TN, you might know).
Furthermore, anyone who’s used MapQuest or Google Maps should know not to put blind trust in that map. I’ve had both services, on more than one occasion, put me elsewhere than where I needed to be, or display incorrect information, and in those cases, I supplemented the map with other sources to get to my destination. A 60-year-old map isn’t going to be much different in that it too will have errors.
Let me extend what you quoted from Andy Stanley. Yeah, you aren’t going to know everything you need to know to be successful. Yeah, people can be successful from what they learned from others, but you have to be willing to learn, and you have to be able to seek the right people in your path. The stubborn ones are going to get lost, and I sure wouldn’t ask someone from California on how to best travel through Ohio. Likewise, I’m not going to ask an Atheist on how to get closer to God.
That saying, in my path toward being closer to God, aside from my time with Him and the time reading His word, I actually consult more than one version of the Bible whenever there is something I need to (I have 3 versions in book form, plus I have BibleGateway.com bookmarked on all of my PCs so I can quickly consult and cross-check passages between versions). At the same time, I discuss the issues affecting us with fellow Christian friends and leaders, and I also look at other sources (such as books and websites).
The one thing that does trouble me (kind of like road construction), is how some Christians tend to be self-centered and want to concentrate on things that are irrelevant compared to the issues that have a stronger chance of affecting us now, such as the economy, health care, and unemployment. Instead of trying to talk about how to confront those situations, we seem to have the “oh that sucks… I’m sorry” attitude, and then we moan and groan about the proposed solutions are politicians are talking about. Of course, around here, people either want to throw blind support or blind protest at our government, instead of helping our government working toward solutions that we sorely need. In relation to this, we’re relying on autopilot to fly us to our destination, but autopilot isn’t going to get us back down on the ground, and nobody knows how, or is willing to, land the plane.