Guided

I've been meaning to write a post about something that happened while I was out of town ten days ago: I got lost. I got really, really lost. I'm a pretty good navigator, usually, but I was driving in a city with a weird layout and a ton of construction. My phone died. I memorized directions from a friend's phone when I dropped her off for a dinner meeting, and attempted to follow them over to my hotel. Unfortunately, Google Maps tried to send me down a closed road. Not "closed to through traffic," but closed altogether. Dug up and impassable. Thanks, Google Maps!

No problem, I thought to myself. I'll park the car in this municipal lot and walk over. They'll be able to tell me how to avoid the construction and I won't have to navigate the one-way streets. But the lot was full, overflowing even, and I could not find street parking at all. No problem, I thought to myself. I'll come at it from the other direction. And then...I was off on my scenic tour. 

I tried to get back to where I needed to be, only to find that I had driven myself in a giant circle and was preparing to start lap #2 of the scenic tour. This is silly, I said to myself. What did we do in the 90s when we were lost? We stopped at a gas station and asked for directions, that's what we did. The gas station attendant was not a native English speaker. "That's a good question!" she chirped when I asked for directions to my hotel. "Maybe you should ask next door at the carwash." Which was closed.

"I can do this," I said to myself. "I have been in this city before." Slowly and carefully I drove myself...the rest of the way around the same circle. Even giving my full attention to the task of getting to my hotel, I was starting lap #3 of my giant circle around the wrong part of the city. I'd been driving around for 45 minutes at this point. I was hungry.

I pulled into a parking lot and prayed aloud. "Holy Spirit, I need you to guide me. I don't have a map. I don't know where I'm going. But you know where I'm going, and I am asking you to help me get there."

"That was kind of ridiculous," said Mean Skeptical Jamie to Trusting Hopeful Jamie. "What if the Holy Spirit just wants you to grow in patience here? How is the Holy Spirit going to operate here, exactly? Is it going to be like Inigo Montoya following his sword around in search of the Man in Black?"

I headed out, unpersuaded that this circuit would really be any different. But this time I saw a lake winking to my left. "If I keep that lake on my left," I said, "then I will wind up in the right spot." I made one wrong turn, but it was easy to sort out. Immediately afterward I thought to myself, "What if I take this little road here?" And you guys, it was beautiful -- it carried me right along the lake, with none of the traffic that had been stressing me out. "This is too good to be true," I thought to myself. "Where's the dead end?"

The lovely quiet road tipped me out at exactly the intersection I had been trying to find. And -- it gets better -- there was municipal parking right there in that first block, with spaces available. I parked the car and headed up to my hotel on foot. "It's not going to be in this block," I said to myself. "There's too much construction here. I'm going to have to keep walking." But LO: there was my hotel.

Does this sound a little freaky and perhaps implausible to you? Because I am telling you the story exactly as it happened. And it seems to me that it is full of true things about how God guides us: it's usually true that we have to use our own eyes and our own brains, even as we invite him to nudge us in ways we cannot quite explain. It's usually true that a wrong turn doesn't mean all is lost. It's usually true that God gives us more than we ask for: the unexpected beauty and peace of the drive, the immediate parking fix -- and the destination that was closer than I'd dared to hope.

Mean Skeptical Jamie was last seen stroking her chin contemplatively.