The summer I was this freckled kid of 10, I got hopelessly lost with my parents and grandparents, my old grandfather behind the wheel of a 1982 red Chevy, circling a knot of detours and construction, exits and ramps and highways, in good ole Cincinnati, Ohio.
With her freckled legs and bare feet dangling out the rolled down window, in the backseat beside me, Grandma kept hollering, “Lloyd, I’m telling you, man! How many times are we going to circle around this dang detour like blind bats banging a brick wall before you break down and ask somebody, anybody, for directions, you hear me, man!?”
Idiocy is taking the same route again and again
and expecting to arrive somewhere better.
Her clicking tongue would tsk tsk him as she rubbed her legs with gobs of pink Rose Milk lotion from the pump bottle she kept tucked in the back pocket of the car seat for routine travel slather-sessions, the other leg stuck half out the window of the non-air-conditioned car.
“For crying out loud, Lloyd!” She slapped her lotion-slathered leg. “We’ve driven by this same sign 4 times! Why stay lost instead of asking for directions? Man alive, it’s your stubborn pride that keeps you lost more than anything else!”
The man kept driving like he didn’t hear her.
Grandpa just kept stubbornly circling construction-erupted Cincinnati kind of like a reenactment of that age-old definition of being crazy, which could be summed up as simple as this:
Idiocy is taking the same route again and again
and expecting to arrive somewhere better.
When I was no longer a kid, but still sporting a few freckles more than 3 decades later, I read of a man who says he was in the wayfinding business, designing signs, readable, decodable, accessible, to direct travellers on their way, and he says:
“While traveling, people are a bit more anxious and that affects how they act.”
While you’re trying to find your way, anxiety has a way of always finding you, and changing the way you are.
The wayfinding guy who designs signage says that the truth is:
“When people become really stressed, nothing helps them find their way except asking other people.”
“Nothing helps us find the Way like being in a community of other WayFarers on the Way.”
Nothing helps us find the Way
like being in a community of other WayFarers
on the Way.
Nothing helps us find the Way to our true destiny like true community.
It’s our connections that influence our directions. If you don’t slow down long enough to make some real connections, you’re going to keep losing the right direction.
If you really want to know the way out of any Cincinnati, you’ve got to slow down long enough to really connect with somebody. If you actually want to find a way out of all the detours, you’re going to have to detour into some community.
Because the truth is: If you step on a subway going the wrong way, you can’t turn anything around by running from car to car the right way.
“Nothing is more important in your whole life than having a way of life that keeps you in the Way Himself, who is our only Way through.“
Turns out: You can be going through the motions of the right direction, while actually moving much faster in the wrong direction.
You need to be moving in more than the right direction — you’ve got to get on the subway with a whole community of people all moving the right way.
Unless you’re moving with other people on The Way — it’s devastatingly easy for you to lose the Way.
And what I am not sure the Wayfinder guy fully realized:
Nothing helps you find your way like asking The Way Himself.
Nothing is more important in your whole life than having a way of life that keeps you in the Way Himself, who is our only Way through.
The saints who have gone before, taking tried and true ways, created what they called “a way of life” — and my deeply vulnerable story of WayMaker offers a very practical, accessible compass to explore six key spiritual disciplines that can turn the whole of a life around, to discover more than a way through — but to discover a whole new way of being. A whole new way of life.
There is a way to live your life, an actual “way of life,” that actually transforms your life.
“Everything in life has a way of forming us and transforming us — the only question is if it’s transforming us more into the ways of Christ.”
No direction matters more in your life than turning toward having a daily sacred way and rhythm of life — because this changes the trajectory and destination of your one life literally for forever and all eternity.
Nothing in our life isn’t forming us one way or the other, and absolutely everything in life is formational. The screens, the movies, the music, the books, the stations, the friends, the peers, the work, the culture, are all forming us whether we are conscious of it or not.
Everything in our life is actually a kind of spiritual director — directing us spiritually closer to the Spirit of God, or directing us toward the spirit of the age.
Everything in life has a way of forming us and transforming us — the only question is if it’s transforming us more into the ways of Christ.
When my Grandfather finally navigated the way out of the detours of a Cincinnati in the midst of summer construction, it was only because he finally pulled over and asked an elderly lady walking her miniature poodle.
And she blossomed into this wrinkled smile and turned and pointed — and then asked for a pen to write it down in words.
Because that is always the best wayfinding:
Good directions always come from a good community of people — who always turn us toward the direction of the good Word Himself.
When Grandpa finally wound his way right out of Cincinatti, us kids all cheered, and Grandma’s bare Rose-milked, freckled legs dangled half out the window like a beckoning wave.
Want a WAy of Life — That Turns Your life Around? Come Practice These Spiritual Disciplines, & a New Way of Life with WAYMAKER Study & Journal:
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How do you find yourself loved beyond imaginging? How do you navigate losses and find the way through painful parts of your story …. and lean into the life you’ve always dreamed of — and trust that it’s not too late for your life to turn around — toward the Way Himself?
What does it powerfully look like to have a new way of life, a new way of being that rests fully in the unwavering, unshakeable, hesed-lovingkind ways of God — especially now?
The practical tool to begin true life-transformation for a different way of life start here:
