The Map in the Glove Box

Margaret Chen had driven the same stretch of Highway 9 for forty years, but the evening her daughter called from a broken-down car somewhere outside Asheville, she pulled over and dug through the glove box until her fingers found the old paper map — the one her husband had folded and refolded so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth.

She didn't hesitate. She didn't wonder whether the map was real, or whether the roads it showed actually existed. She spread it across the steering wheel, traced the blue line with her finger, and drove.

Her daughter was exactly where the map said she'd be.

There's something we miss in Jesus's words in Matthew 7 when we read them as a gentle suggestion. "Ask... seek... knock." In the original Greek, these are present active imperatives — keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. The image is not of someone politely tapping once and stepping back. It's someone who knows there's a person on the other side of that door.