I mean, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise?
“You have to know where your feet are actually at, to decide what map you actually have to get into your hands. Wrong Map? Wrong way.”
But if you’re holding a detailed, accurate map for Taipei? But your feet are planted on a good ole street in Tennessee? It shouldn’t come as a surprise that you can’t find your way to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge across from the old historic Ryman in Nashville.
If you aren’t holding the right map for where your feet actually are, you can’t ever get to where you actually want to go.
Wrong map? Wrong way.
I can’t remember when exactly it happened, but this one phrase has lodged on endless repeat in my head and has radically reoriented my heart and feet and the direction of my life:
This is our Father’s world.
This is our Father’s world.
This isn’t an aimless rock floating haphazardly through the universe, and we don’t get to make up whatever laws or logic that we like.
Regardless of whatever any headline keeps blasting, whatever the sound-waves keep screeching, whatever all the social streams about drown us all in: this is not our world.
This is not the world of those with the big microphones or glaring cameras, this is not the world of the supposed big wigs or power-brokers or game changers, this is not the world of the stock markets or the suits or the smooth-talkers, this is not our world.
We don’t get to make up the way this world works, because we aren’t living in a world we made — we are living in the WayMaker’s world.
We don’t get to make up the way this world works, because we aren’t living in a world we made — we are living in the WayMaker’s world.
For all our thinking that this is our planet, the reality is: Not one person on planet earth has ever breathed life into lung, or sculpted dust into soul, or birthed a blanket of dancing stars out of absolutely nothing.
This is our Father’s world.
Don’t gloss over this: For your blood-clotting function to perform, neither of its key ingredients, vitamin K and antihemophilic factor, can be missing. Which means, your blood-clotting function is an irreducibly complex system — which causes, as writes, biochemist, Michael Behe, a significant “problem for Darwinian evolution.”
Listen to this: There wouldn’t even be one person on this whole spinning marble in space if there was even the slightest difference in how atomic nuclei bind together, as biophysicist Alister McGrath writes, “This force, which has a value of 0.007…if it “were 0.006 or 0.008, human beings could not exist.”
Everyone travelling through this word has got to know: This is our Father’s World.
Be mindblown by the reality: Change the force binding protons to neutrons by even five percent — and there wouldn’t be a human being on the planet.
Pay attention and be awed: The cosmological constant must be fine-tuned to one part in 101 to the 20th, in order for any life to actually exist on this pale blue dot in space.
How does anyone muster up enough blind faith to believe all this is accident?
Is our existence really some cosmic jackpot coincidence?
Honest question: How does anyone muster up enough blind faith to believe all this is accident?
You tell me: Is this all really a wildly lucky accident of physics, that water just happens to exist as a liquid, that chains of carbon atoms just happen to form complex organic molecules, that hydrogen atoms just luckily form breakable bridges between molecules?
Read this twice: Over thirty different cosmic parameters must be precisely set, like dials on a dashboard, to create a world like this, for life like this to exist.
Is our existence really some cosmic jackpot coincidence?
As Freeman Dyson, a mathematical physicist world renowned for his research in quantum field theory and nuclear physics, once remarked, “the more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”
No one is going around making up the idea of God — God is the one who had the idea of us and literally made us. And because this universe is fine-tuned for life — the only way to fully live in this universe is to be fully attuned to God.
Look out your window right, look in the mirror, and see actual reality: The universe only looks like it was prepared for humanity’s coming, because there is One who created the universe precisely so humanity could come — and He Himself came for all of humanity.
There is no way to get around it: This is a planned planet.
This is our Father’s world.
Meaning: No one is going around making up the idea of God — God is the one who had the idea of us and literally made us.
And because this universe is fine-tuned for life — the only way to fully live in this universe is to be fully attuned to God. (And if the universe seems just fit for life — doesn’t that actually mean that God just fits into all the emptiness in our lives?)
It’s only when you know this is our Father’s world, that you know which map of the world you actually need in your hands, to know which way your feet should actually go.
It’s only when you know that you are breathing in the rarefied air of God, that you can reach for only map that makes sense of any of this old world, that this is all the sod of God.
I think of it often these days: During World War II, my grandfather was a messenger who was given maps and coded messages and maps from superiors to memorize and then deliver.
Night after night, he ran a dirt bike across unfamiliar terrain, just following the map in his head that he’d memorized, to deliver the encoded message, desperately trying to avoid interception from the enemy, carrying message and map only in head, so that if the enemy captured him, they’d find nothing in his hands.
One night, in the thick black dark, my grandfather, laying low on his army dirt bike that he ran without any lights so as to avoid detection, kept turning around and around, looking for a distinguished knoll that he had memorized from the topographical map, which would be his clear sign that he was supposed to turn and head north.
But in spite of backtracking and retracing his track, back and forth, spending precious hours looking for the knoll, he couldn’t find it, no way, no how.
My grandfather cut the engine.
Then he stood there with his dirt bike in the quieting dark, mentally analyzing the map he had in his head. And then he realized it like a flash of light in the dark:
If the map in your head doesn’t match what you see under your feet, then you’re working with the wrong map.
Epiphany for life.
If things keep going wrong, maybe the map in hand might actually be wrong?
If you aren’t where you want to be — what are the ways your map might not reflect the way of the earth under your feet?
When the map in our heads doesn’t agree with the earth under our feet, there is a way —a sacred way — to have God’s right map in the heart, which always, always, always leads the right way through.
Because this is our Father’s world.
It’s only when we know that this is the WayMaker’s world, can we ever expect to finally discover the way we dreamed through the world.
This one is for all of us who want a real way through…
For every person who has faced a no-way sign on the way to their dreams, WayMaker is your sign, that there is hope, that there are miracles, and that everything you are trying to find a way to, is actually coming to meet you in ways far more fulfilling than you ever imagined.
Grab Your Copy of WayMaker — and begin the journey you’ve secretly been hoping for.
