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Yesterday I had to drive 3 hours to Chicago OHare Airport to pick up my wife from a flight. As I often do, before I left I checked Google to see what the best/fastest route would be. I know Chicago well having lived there two different times, but there are basically 3 ways to go to the airport from Michigan and I have often found Google helpful to tell me if there is an accident and therefore an alternate, time-saving route to take. I knew the most direct and easiest route is normally the 294 bypass route around Chicago to Ohare. Yesterday Google confirmed that…at first.

All was well until I hit the Indiana/Illinois border where I ran into a traffic jam. Google maps was pinging me to take a long, alternate route and saying it would be over 4 HOURS to arrive at OHare! That would of course make me very late to pick up my wife. I got off the highway and started following Google’s directions, but it didn’t feel right or make sense. A lot of other people were getting off with me…all following the change advised by Google as a “shortcut”.

The exit it directed me to take was directly into Gary, Indiana…a city with a reputation for crime and insecurity. Even in the daytime, everything was looking dark and foreboding. The route took me parallel for a time to the highway I left. As I looked over I could see the traffic was moving almost as fast as my new road. I quickly decided to take the next turn back to the highway and keep going with the route I had been planning all along. The new Google route was getting jammed up with the masses trying to go around the straight highway route.

Once back on the highway, the traffic kept reducing since more people had taken the exits suggested by Google. I could not figure out why Google was doing this, and all the way to the Ohare exit it kept trying to redirect me and tell me to turn around because I was going the “wrong way”. It also kept telling me it would take hours to arrive at Ohare. I was finally rewarded for my decision with a safe and timely arrival at the airport to achieve my goal of being reunited with my wife. The system had not been correct in pushing for detours.

The allegory of this experience was immediately evident to me as I was driving and I hope I can communicate it here as clearly as it was in my mind yesterday…

The Bible tells us:

And there will be a highway called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not travel it–only those who walk in the Way–and fools will not stray onto it. (Isaiah 35:8)

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. (Matthew 7:13)

My spiritual journey is so similar to this experience yesterday. True spirituality through faith in Christ is often not easy or completely clear.  In the battle for our souls between God and Satan, we are often bombarded from all sides with choices or barriers we must overcome. The majority of people follow the easy path of least resistance. That usually means going with the majority opinion of what is true or false…no matter what the real truth is. I did this for decades in terms of following “secular humanism”.

It is one thing to gain faith in God’s plan and direction for our lives. It is quite another to stay on the path of righteousness and what we KNOW.  When the majority around us are convinced to follow the ways of this world, it gets harder for us to go the right way and not believe or agree with the majority.

We see more and more professing Christians going with the “progressive Christian” beliefs of today which do not align with the Biblical way we have always known. It becomes easier to believe the detours this secular world pushes on us instead of believing the eternal truth of God’s Word. Somehow we believe God changes with the times even though the Word is consistently saying “God is the same yesterday, today, and forever”. That which was sin from the beginning is still sin today. The only way to God is through Jesus Christ. There are not multiple ways to salvation or justification of ourselves. Works will not get us where we want to go. We may find ways back to the truth when we stray off that path for a while…but in reality it always puts us behind where we could have been if we had simply stayed on course with God’s plan.

I am now convinced that the closer we get to the destination of God’s new kingdom which is our eternal goal, there will be fewer and fewer people with us on the journey. It will at times be a very solitary journey because most people choose to follow a different route. “There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. (Proverbs 14:12)”. Our way will not get us to the destination God has for us…yet we are given a choice of paths.

I think we can apply these principles to so many issues in our lives today. With the advent of COVID, the Marxist-controlled governments of today, and the powers of the MSM (mainstream media)…it is hard to know real truth anymore. More than ever we need to seek God and His Word for the questions that lie before us.  We all face decisions the world confronts us with…wear a mask, don’t wear a mask…get the vaccine or not…accept women’s right to abort or not…go along with social justice movements or not…keep quiet about LGBTQ or not. The powers that be are trying to change our minds and control our behaviors. Are we going to follow the world’s direction, or go our own way under the direction of the Bible and God’s Holy Spirit.

I am glad I followed my own intuition yesterday and was able to pick up my wife on time. I hope the rest of my life I can be as bold and independent on these other bigger spiritual issues. May I be able to say with the Psalmist, “You have made known to me the path of life; You will fill me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand. (Psalm 16:11)

Let us stay on the straight and narrow pathway…it will be worth it.