The Route That Makes No Sense

If you have ever used Waze, the crowd-sourced navigation app, you know the experience. You are heading somewhere familiar — a route you have driven a hundred times — and suddenly Waze tells you to turn off the highway onto a side street you have never noticed. It routes you through a residential neighborhood, past a school, around a park, and back onto the highway two exits later. The whole time, you are gripping the steering wheel, muttering, "This cannot be right."

But Waze sees what you cannot see. It knows there is a three-car pileup two miles ahead. It has real-time data from thousands of other drivers feeding information back to the system. The route looks foolish from where you sit, but from above — from the vantage point of all that data — it is the only wise path.

Obedience to God works the same way. When the Almighty told Abraham to leave Ur, the route made no sense. When He told Joshua to march around Jericho, it looked absurd. When Jesus told Peter to cast his nets on the other side of the boat after a fruitless night, it defied every instinct Peter had as a fisherman.

God sees the pileups ahead. He holds information we will never have access to on this side of eternity.

The question is never whether His directions make sense to us. The question is whether we trust the One giving them enough to take the next turn.