Direction

In an interview with The New York Times the actor Bill Murray revealed how every human being has suffering and losses. The interviewer asked: “You lost your dad at 17. Do you think your dad’s passing put you on a particular path?”

Murray replied, “I do. I think I had two events in my life. That was one, and the other one, was when I was about 4, my younger sister contracted polio. I wasn’t aware of what was happening, but all of a sudden you become not exactly an afterthought, but you’re not the primary worry anymore. I had a great birthday when I was 5. I got a Davy Crockett bicycle with a rifle sheath and a rifle that came with it loaded on the frame of the bike. It had saddle bags. I got a coonskin cap, I got a Cubs jacket and a Cubs hat, a baseball and a bat. And I never had another birthday until I was 13. That was it. Then when I was 17, my father died. There went the family income. Whatever life we were with nine kids by that point, was going to be even more crimped. So I had to figure out how to get by in life.”

Hidden acoustic wonders called “whispering walls” have awed listeners since ancient times. The field of “archaeo-acoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. A whispering gallery is usually a circular, hemispherical, or elliptical enclosure, often beneath a dome or a vault, in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the gallery.

A whispering gallery allows whispered communication from one part of the internal side of the circumference to another specific part. The sound is carried by waves, known as whispering-gallery waves, that travel around the circumference clinging to the walls. This effect has been discovered in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and Grand Central Station in New York, among others.

When a visitor stands at one focus the sound waves carry the words so that others will be able to hear the whispers from the opposite side of the gallery. Even when the room is filled with many people talking, the whisper can be heard, but only by standing in exactly the right location, others in the room won’t hear the whisper at all.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is possible to hear the slightest whisper spoken in a massive room filled with people, but only when you stand in just the right place. In the same way, in a noisy, bustling world, it is possible to hear the “whisper” of God (1 Kings 19:12), but only if we are standing in the right place of obedience, readiness, and quiet waiting.

Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. The cognitive scientist says, “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days.” And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

Cognitive psychologist Nora Newcombe says, “People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate.” But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.”

Several cultural factors were associated with wayfinding skills. Country folk did better, on average, than people from cities. And among city-dwellers, those from cities with more chaotic street networks did better than those from cities like Chicago, where the streets form a regular grid. This is perhaps because residents of grid cities don’t need to build such complex mental maps.

Results like these suggest that an individual’s life experience may be one of the biggest determinants of how well they navigate. Support for the notion that people might improve with practice also comes from studies of what happens when people stop using their navigation skills. Researchers recruited 50 young adults and questioned them about their lifetime experience of driving with GPS. Then they tested the volunteers in a virtual world that required them to navigate without GPS. The heaviest GPS users did worse, they found. This strongly suggests that GPS reliance causes diminished skills, rather than poor skills leading to greater GPS use.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Guidance; Lostness - Some people are better at staying on course than others. However, in the spiritual realm, we are all hopelessly lost until Jesus came to our rescue (Isa. 53:6; Luke 19:10); 2) Believers; Direction; Sin, consequences of – Believers sometimes wander away from the truth and need the rod and the staff of the shepherd (Ps. 23:4; Ps. 119:176; Jam. 5:19).

Have you ever heard about "The Ant Death Spiral"? A fascinating NPR article describes this phenomenon. A particular species of army ant is utterly blind, so they get about by sniffing trails left by the ants in front of them. They, in turn, leave chemical trails of their own.

But, as the article notes, "the system works smoothly when everybody's going in a straight line in one direction. But when the lead ants start to loop, bad things can happen …. If the ant-in-front loops and intersects with its old trail, the whole crowd then turns in on itself and everybody gets caught in the endless circle." Another researcher wrote, “this circle is commonly known as a ‘death spiral’ because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and in ant colony simulations.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Theodore C. Schneirla, the scientist who first observed this behavior, was quick to point out "that ants get stuck in ways that we humans never do." I'm not so sure Schneirla is right about that.

NFL lineman Jim Marshall was part of the revered “Purple People Eater” Minnesota Viking defensive line. For twenty seasons he never missed a game, earning a reputation for toughness and reliability. On October 25, 1964, playing against the San Francisco 49ers, Marshall recovered a fumble in the fourth quarter and ran untouched for sixty-six yards to the end zone.

After crossing the goal line, he tossed the ball away and began celebrating. Imagine his surprise when an opposing player trotted up, patted him on the back, and thanked him. Marshall suddenly realized that he was standing in the wrong end zone. He had just scored a safety, giving two points to the 49ers. The Vikings still won that day, thanks to eight total turnovers from the 49ers.

On the return flight to Minnesota, teammates ribbed Marshall, who said he simply got confused. “They kept telling me to get up in the cockpit and fly the plane. That way we'd end up in Hawaii instead of Minnesota.”

In football, as in much of life, it doesn’t matter that you’re doing something earnestly if you aren’t doing the right thing.

After he died attempting to cross a collapsed bridge in his vehicle, the family of a local man is suing Google because its Maps app directed him to do so.

Philip Paxson was using Google Maps to navigate while driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party when the app directed him across a bridge that had collapsed nearly a decade prior, but lacked any kind of warning of the danger. Paxson family attorney Robert Zimmerman said:

For years before this tragedy, Hickory residents asked for the road to be fixed or properly barricaded before someone was hurt or killed. Their demands went unanswered. We’ve discovered that Google Maps misdirected motorists like Mr. Paxson onto this collapsed road for years, despite receiving complaints from the public demanding that Google fix its map and directions to mark the road as closed.

In addition to Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), the Paxson family is also suing two local companies who it claims were responsible for maintaining the bridge and failed to put up any warning signage or safety barricades.

Paxson said, “I still can’t understand how those responsible for the GPS directions, and the bridge, could have acted with so little regard for human life. No one should ever lose a loved one this way.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Consequences; Irresponsibility - When we put off or refuse to do the right thing when given a chance, the Lord will sometimes allow calamitous circumstances to unfold as the natural consequence of imprudent inaction; 2) Danger; Direction; Destruction – Ultimately, we must each take responsibility for the “road” we choose and not depend on others to make that choice for us (Prov. 16:25; Matt. 7:13)

Carolyn Arends is a Canadian Christian musician, author, and speaker. In an issue of CT magazine, she writes:

Years ago, I toured as an opening act for Rich Mullins. I loved overhearing conversations at the autograph table; they often turned serious and urgent.

More than once, a fan asked Rich how to discern the will of God. Rich would listen and then offer an unexpected perspective. He’d say, “I don’t think finding God’s plan for you has to be complicated. God’s will is that you love him with all your heart and soul and mind, and also that you love your neighbor as yourself. Get busy with that, and then, if God wants you to do something unusual, he’ll take care of it. Say, for example, he wants you to go to Egypt.” Rich would pause for a moment before flashing his trademark grin. “If that’s the case, he’ll provide 11 jealous brothers, and they’ll sell you into slavery.”

When I find myself wrestling with life decisions, I think of Rich’s Egypt Principle. It makes me laugh, and then it asks me to get down to the serious business of determining which of my options allow me to best love God and other people.

Maybe that’s why Rich could claim that loving God and others takes care of most of our discernment questions. After all, the psalmist assures us that if we delight ourselves in the Lord, he will give us the desires of our heart (Ps. 37:4). God can be trusted to teach our hearts what to desire, and to lead us—by jealous brothers, burning bushes, or quiet inclinations—to the places where our own unique giftings meet the movements of his kingdom. There we find consolation and joy.

R. Douglas Fields writes about the vigorous activity of the brain during sleep:

Midway between our unconscious and conscious minds there is the altered mental state of sleep. If you should live to the age of seventy-five, you will have spent perhaps twenty-five of those years asleep. What goes on in your head during that block of your lifetime is largely beyond your knowledge or comprehension. It is a mysterious and still mystical chunk of ourselves.

If sleep were simply a nightly hibernation, a shutting down of our system in the dark, it could be understood as a reasonable strategy to save power for the daytime when we can be physically active. Sleep might be much like a laptop computer going into temporary hibernation to save resources during long periods of inactivity. But hibernation is hardly what goes on in the human brain during sleep. Sleep is a vigorous period of brain activity. It is an altered state, not an inert state.

There are cycles and patterns of activity during our nocturnal unconscious life shuttling enormous amounts of activity through different brain circuits. Events of the day—conscious and unconscious—are reexamined, sorted, associated, filed, or discarded. Memories are moved from one place in the brain and filed in different places in our cerebral cortex according to such factors as the type of information they contain, their connections to other events, and the internal emotional states of mind stamping them with significance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We read repeatedly in Scripture that God spoke to one servant or another in a dream, or while they slept. He even spoke to unbelievers whose actions could impact his people. Why does God choose to speak to people while they sleep? Maybe it is because they are so busy or so distracted or so obstinate while awake that he speaks to them when they are asleep.

Watson Thornton was already serving as a missionary in Japan when he decided to join the Japan Evangelistic Band. He decided to travel to the town where the organization’s headquarters were located and to introduce himself to its leader. But just as he was about to get on the train, he felt a tug in his spirit that he took to be the leading of the Lord telling him to wait. He was puzzled but thought he should obey.

When the next train rolled into the station, Watson started to board but again felt he should wait. When the same thing happened with the third train, Watson began to feel foolish. Finally, the last train arrived, and once more Watson felt a check. “Don’t get on the train,” it seemed to say. Watson thought he had wasted most of the day for no apparent reason. Yet as he turned to go, he heard a voice call out his name. It was the mission leader he had intended to see. He came to ask whether Watson would consider joining the Japan Evangelistic Band. If Watson had ignored the impulse and boarded the train, he would have missed the meeting.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can’t just live by our intuition, can we? We do see something like intuition at work in the lives of God’s people in the Bible. Paul tries to enter Asia and Bithynia but is “kept by the Holy Spirit” from doing so (Acts 16:6-7). We do not always get it right using either intuition or careful deliberation. God uses both to guide us. The art of being led by the Spirit is not a matter of waiting each moment for some mystical experience of divine direction. It is a matter of trusting God for the power to obey what he has already told you to do.

Passengers on an Emirates flight bound for Auckland, New Zealand that left Dubai one Friday morning ended up landing back at the same airport where it took off a little more than 13 hours later.

Flight EK448 departed at 10:30 a.m. local time but the pilot turned around nearly halfway into the almost 9,000-mile journey, landing back in Dubai just after midnight Saturday, according to FlightAware.

Auckland Airport was forced to close due to severe flooding. The airport statement said, "Auckland Airport has been assessing the damage to our international terminal and unfortunately determined that no international flights can operate today. We know this is extremely frustrating but the safety of passengers is our top priority."

Emirates said in a statement, "We regret the inconvenience caused to customers. Emirates will continue to monitor the situation in Auckland and issue updates where required."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Have you ever started on a long trip only to experience one complication after another only to find yourself right back where you started? In that case, you might begin to understand the frustration of the Israelites, who through disobedience, had to turn away in sight of the Promised Land and spend 40 years going around in circles in the desert before they returned to where they had started on the border of the Promised Land.

When was the last time you needed to use your cell phone as a flashlight, perhaps to look for something in the garage, read a menu at a darkly lit restaurant, or find something in the backyard at night? Why did you need it? Your answer probably includes some expression of dark or darkness.

As a sinner living with other sinners in a fallen world, you encounter darkness every day. While you may experience Instagram-worthy, sunny day picnic lunches, the reality is that life is more of a midnight walk through the woods. On any given day, you probably encounter more darkness than you do truth. So, to move forward without danger and get to where you are meant to go, you need something to light your way.

No passage gets at this need and God's provision better than Psalm 119:105: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, a passenger with no flight experience called Air Traffic Control in Fort Pierce, Florida airport and said, “I’ve got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”

Around noon an air traffic controller named Robert Morgan was outside the tower reading a book on a break when his co-worker yelled, “There’s a passenger flying a plane that’s not a pilot and the pilot is incapacitated so they said you need to help them try and land the plane.”

Morgan was the man for the job. In addition to his 20 years in tower control, he is also a flight instructor with around 1,200 hours under his belt.

Morgan told reporters, “I knew the plane was flying, I just knew I had to keep him calm, point him to the runway and tell him how to reduce the power so he could descend to land.” Then Morgan proceeded to walk the first-time pilot step-by-step through the landing procedure for the Cessna Grand Caravan. Morgan even ran out to the tarmac and joyfully embraced his student.

Morgan said, “It felt really good to help somebody and he told me that he couldn’t wait to get home and hug his pregnant wife.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Guidance; Mentoring - When disaster or crises arise, we need a wise mentor or guide to walk us through it. 2) Holy Spirit - The Holy Spirit is our flight controller who can guide us through the worst that life can throw at us (John 16:13; Rom. 8:14).

In a review of A.J. Swoboda’s book Dusty Roads, Leslie Fields writes:

We all have stories of getting lost. Here is one of mine: I crossed the Sahara one year on an expedition truck with 20 others, meandering from Cairo into the heart of Africa. We got lost often, once for three days, wandering farther and farther into the African bush with insufficient water, no GPS, and no people to point the way out. We were tense: we had to get off the dirt roads before the monsoon rains began. For most of those months, we were covered in dust, breathing through bandanas, praying we’d find the right path.

That’s one kind of “lost narrative.” Here’s another: As I write, I am on the brink of major life changes—some prayed for, a few drastic and unwelcome. I find myself stumbling, fearful, uncertain of these new snaking roads and unsure of God’s place in it all. Then I feel guilty. Where is my faith? Why am I not “counting it all joy” and skipping confidently into the sunny future?

A. J. Swoboda’s book, The Dusty Ones: Why Wandering Deepens Your Faith, came to my door at the right time. It is, of course, about the second kind of trek: our pilgrimage toward the city of God, with its painful desert crossings and wanderings.

We all want a life marked by straight paths, smooth roads, and victorious arrivals. But as Swoboda argues, wandering is “an inescapable theme of the Christian experience,” even if the church has often minimized its inevitable role in every pilgrim’s progress.

Returning to my own story, our expedition truck arrived in Mombasa five months later, nearly on schedule. We beat the monsoon rains, but the trip was not just about getting there. Every village, waterhole, and sandpit along the way had purpose and value. So it is with our lives. Swoboda reminds us that “Christian spirituality is a slow train that must inevitably stop at every little Podunk town in our life—nothing can be skipped over.”

The popular Pursuit of Wonder YouTube channel (almost two million subscribers) gives an excellent concise insight on Existentialism. One segment is noteworthy:

Now more than ever we are exposed to a plethora of ideas about life. The Internet has made it so we can consume a seemingly unending amount of content on the topic of living most effectively. However, simultaneously, this access to information has also allowed the consumer to realize just how conflicting most ideas are.

In the West, the popularity of traditional religion (has) reduced as a result. (And) for many, the increasing access to information has revealed that the world is basically without any discernible truth, and most ideas about how to live are inconclusive and unreliable. It is fair to speculate that this could be a major contributing factor to the modern world's increasing levels of anxiety, cynicism, and disillusion.

Choosing between conflicting ideas of how to live has always been an issue for the individual. But in the modern world, where conflicting ideas are constantly smacking us in the face, we can often find ourselves failing in our attempt to find footing in this reality.

At birth it's as if we are all given a slab of clay. We get to choose what to mold it into. However, … there is no right or wrong way to mold the clay. Rather there are endless ways, all equally absurd, all equally meaningless.

You can watch the video here.

Jacob Smith, is a 15-year-old legally blind freeride skier. Jacob has extreme tunnel vision--and no depth perception on top of that. What he does see is blurry. His visual acuity is rated 20/800, four times the level of legal blindness. Think of the big E on the eye chart. He would need it to be blown up four times in order to see it from 20 feet away.

So how does Jacob ski like this? His family keeps him on course. On competition days, Jacob’s little brother, Preston, patiently helps him hike to the top of the venue. It's so high, the lifts won't take you there. Then his father, Nathan, helps him get down. Jacob has a two-way radio turned up high in his pocket. His dad is on the other end at the base, somehow, calmly, guiding him down.

His father, Nathan Smith, said:

It's on me to make sure I don't let him down. I have to guide him through narrower chutes or not go off a cliff. Jacob is not reckless. He knows his limitations. I think he has the ability to ski anything on the mountain, but he's not gonna go try to do it by himself. Like, he wants to be with somebody who he trusts. He won't ski with people he doesn't trust.

When Jacob was asked how much he trusted his father, he replied, “I mean, enough to turn right when he tells me to.”

It's significant that in Scripture, wisdom is often associated with a path. Are you going in the right direction? Are you veering off the path? Do you know where you are on the map? What's your compass? At the end of the day, wisdom is less about information than orienta­tion. All the geographic data points in the world are useless if we have no sense of north.

All of us wander in whichever nomadic direction our hearts choose, until we submit to the authority of God's good compass. He alone illuminates the path of wisdom. The fool says in his heart, "There is no God" (Ps. 14:1), and thus wanders aimlessly through the desert. The wise man, by contrast, lives a radically God-centered life.

Tozer puts it this way:

As the sailor locates his position on the sea by "shooting" the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There is much to look at in life. Our eyes flutter back and forth faster than they can properly process. Wisdom is focusing our gaze on God: looking to him, praying to him, zealously seeking after him. The Psalms constantly reinforce this: “My eyes are ever on the Lord” (Ps. 25:15. Ps. 141:8).

Singer-song-writer Sandra McCracken writes in an issue of CT magazine:

I live in an old house. Along with the charms of age, this old house has some surprises. One of these is the angle of the top three stairs leading to the bedrooms. One stair is too short, while the next one is too deep. It was a creative renovation solution from a previous owner who finished the attic, but it takes some getting used to.

When I need to take the stairs at night, I’m careful to grasp both handrails. Before bed the other week, my husband was plotting how he might install some subtle lighting on those tricky stairs for safety. While I could have just learned to deal with our dark hallway and the jagged steps, I was moved by his consideration of such a small thing.

In a similar way, God’s light on our path is a demonstration of his loving consideration for us. The often-memorized John 3:16–19, “For God so loved the world …” goes on to say that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. ... Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light.” Before God broke in, we were in darkness. But he did not leave us in darkness. “He will not let your foot slip” (Ps. 121:3).

God’s marvelous light invites, illuminates, and sends us out (John 3:21; 1 Pet. 2:9). We, whom the Spirit lights, give light to each other and to the world, starting with the smallest things, like a light on the stairs.

49-year-old German brewery worker Erwin Kreuz blew his life savings on a once-in-a-lifetime birthday trip to San Francisco. He’d seen it on TV, and he wanted to visit the Wild West. As the flight from Frankfurt stopped to refuel in Bangor, Maine, before continuing on to California, an air stewardess who had finished her shift told Kreuz to “have a nice time in San Francisco.” Her choice of words would change Kreuz’s life.

Kreuz, who typically enjoyed drinking 17 beers a day, was a little groggy, and on hearing this, got off the plane, jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take him to the city. The cab dropped Kreuz at a hotel in downtown Bangor and he found a tavern to quench his almighty thirst. He wandered Bangor for three days enjoying the sights and sounds that Maine had to offer. Unfortunately, Kreuz still thought he was in San Francisco.

Kreuz was certain he was in San Francisco, and he didn’t stop believing that for three very strange days. At one point Kreuz was reassured by the sight of two Chinese restaurants in the town, something he knew was in San Francisco from the movies. After much wandering, Kreuz decided he must be in a Bay Area suburb, so he hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to downtown San Francisco. The driver sped away as though Kreuz was crazy.

Kreuz returned to the tavern and tried to get some help from a waitress. The language barrier was too great, so she put him in contact with Gertrude Romine who spoke German. Romine and her family took Kreuz into their home, and word spread of the lost tourist, first to the Bangor Daily News, then nationally, then the world.

Hearing of his story, The San Francisco Examiner paid for Kreuz to fly out to his initial destination. When there, he was treated like a visiting dignitary. Kreuz was welcomed by the mayor, who presented him with a proclamation declaring that San Francisco does, in fact, exist.

Kreuz was soon due back at work at the brewery and, after four days in San Francisco, boarded a flight back home holding a “Please let me off in Frankfurt” sign.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Confusion; Eternity; Heaven; Lostness – This humorous story also has a sobering application for all who go through life assuming that at the end of life’s journey they will find themselves in heaven, only to discover that they are greatly mistaken. “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov. 14:12; 16:25).

While Sean Connery may have had many memorable roles, the actor also rejected more than a handful of now-iconic parts. Perhaps most famously, Connery turned down the part of Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Connery was the director's first choice for the role, which would have seen the actor travel to New Zealand to portray the wizard. The producers of the fantasy series were so desperate to get Connery on board that they offered him upwards of $30 million, plus 15 percent of the box-office take (which would have been an additional $447 million for the actor). Yet, the former James Bond didn't budge, and Ian McKellen went on to become Gandalf.

Years later, Connery discussed the Lord of the Rings, revealing that he simply didn't understand the series. He said, “I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movie. I still don't understand it.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We don’t need to completely understand the “script” to be part of God’s story. Suffice to know the Author can be trusted. Sometimes you are in the middle of your life story and it seems to be leading to disaster. At that point you trust the Author. We know it ends well!