Where Guidance Fails by Jeff Beman

August 30, 2022

Proverbs 11:14  Where there is no guidance, a people falls,
     but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.

      This past spring, my family and I went on a vacation in the far north woods, up by
the Canadian border. Except for me, none of the three carloads of family had ever
been up there before, and I had not been there for 50+ years.

      We all had a wonderful time seeing much of nature and finding our way around to
the sights and places that I remembered so fondly from my youth.

      Two things that are in very short supply that far up in the sticks are cell phone
towers and accurate satellite navigation systems. Because I am pretty much “old
school” by nature, I had a very good trucker’s atlas to aid in my admittedly faint
memories, and so on one particular road trip during our vacation, when the
navigation in the truck wanted to have us head off in some bizarre direction that
did not seem right, we referred to the atlas and Bonnie’s memory (“we didn’t come
that way”) and made it back to the lodge in good time despite one tree looking like
every other tree!

      Now the other two cars in our party depended solely on their modern navigation
systems. One followed some truly back woods trails and was quite late in
returning, and the other fared even worse by getting off paved roads altogether and
ended up stuck in the sand!

      In our Christian life, guidance, (i.e., the Word of God), is very important to us all.
But “an abundance of counselors” gains us the safety of making sure we
understand that guidance, and are able to sort out the wrong turns from the truth.
We don’t want to blindly follow something we did not understand.

Dear God - Thank you for the safety and security your Word and guidance has
given each of us. Thank you also for those who counsel us and correct us when
things become unclear.  AMEN