May 20, 2011
Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter
By Melanie Rigney
“These are now his witnesses before the people. We ourselves are proclaiming this good news to you that what God promised our fathers he has brought to fulfillment for us, their children, by raising up Jesus, as it is written in the second psalm, You are my Son; this day I have begotten you.” (Acts 13:31-33)
“I myself have set up my king on Zion, my holy mountain.” (Psalms 2:6)
Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be. Where I am going you know the way.” Thomas said to him, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:1-6)
Piety
Lord, help me to stay on Your course.
Study
Lost is not something I do well. How about you? I hate being disoriented, not knowing for sure where I’m headed or how long to the next turn.
Northern Virginia is difficult, even after more than seven years, for someone like me who learned to drive in the flat-as-a-pancake plains and who spent most of her adult life in Chicago, where there are only a few angle streets and you can count on major thoroughfares east and west, north and south, every half mile. I don’t have any type of GPS in my vehicle, and I’m not sure I could get one if I tried; my car’s twenty years old. I’m a power user of the online direction sites and of maps, even to places I’ve been before. But sometimes those maps are wrong. They don’t tell you the best route and on occasion, they can’t find the place you’re going.
I have friends who seem gifted in this regard, who don’t approach the Seven Corners intersection or the Tysons Corner area or a drive on the Beltway with fear and trepidation. They know the short cuts, and they’re confident of their ability to get to the destination even if the map’s wrong or they run into construction. A detour along the way doesn’t throw them for a loop (or into one, for that matter).
More often than not, these friends also are confident of where Jesus is taking them. They don’t claim to know all the answers; it’s just that they know where they’re going—to the place that Jesus prepares. And for those of us like Thomas who ask, “How can we know the way?” their faith in action is better than any map God could devise. I like to think of them as Jesus’s version of GPS for the rest of us.
Action
How do you know the way? Spend some time in prayer today listening for God’s direction.
