Years ago I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for my job, which at the time was in the computer field. I had never been to that area before, so every place that I went there was a new experience. It did not deter me from exploring; it heightened my desire to go exploring.
I’ll never forget my first trip to the city of San Francisco. It was on a Saturday, toward evening. Approaching the city from the south you can see the skyline, the Bay Bridge, etc. Many of the approaching freeway accesses are elevated, giving you a real panorama of the city’s layout. Then you drop down to the city’s surface streets and the view becomes very limited by all of the tall buildings. Without a wide-angle view of the area it is easy to get turned around and not know which way to go. The streets in California are well marked, maybe the best in all of America for a driver, but it doesn’t help much if you don’t have any idea where the street you’re on goes. To complicate matters, SF is laid out with many one-way streets, especially in the downtown, financial district. Trying to find a street that goes in the direction that you want to try go then becomes complicated by which streets allow traffic to flow in that direction and then becomes further complicated by which one of those streets that flow the way you want to go actually has a connector on ramp to a freeway. Before long you can get very lost and disoriented despite the fact that you are actually in a highly populated, well-marked place. I asked several people which way to go, but since San Francisco has so many international visitors, I ended up getting some not so great directions from a few folks before I learned to first ask them if they were from the area and knew the area. Finally, I asked for help from someone who knew their way around and they quickly set me on the right path.
The idea of the one-way streets was very frustrating at the time, but I realized that as I visited the city more and more and began to learn the flow of things and which streets had on and off ramps where I wanted them, that the one-way streets began to be an advantage to me. They no longer diminished my ability but rather they now enhanced it. It was just a matter of learning the layout. Once I made the adjustment and got into the flow, I actually benefited.
My faith walk has proved to be very similar. Often I have looked at Christianity from the wide-angle view and thought about how beautiful it was to be a part of something so marvelous. Somehow though when I get down into the trenches of its paths, the layout doesn’t always seem so clear and I’m not always confident about which way to go. There are times when I want to complain about the restrictions there are on where the proper flow allows me to go and where it does not, or I want to get in there and go my own way and still end up in the same spot as quickly or quicker than I would by following the tried and true path of the faith, which has already been established and proven. If you’re not sure, ask for help. This is called being discipled. But make sure you’re asking someone who isn’t all turned around himself. There’s little benefit to following someone else who’s lost too.
When I was in San Francisco, I didn’t do as well at navigating the pathways there until I learned the proper flow and then conformed to it. In our faith walk, we would do well to heed this lesson and learn and conform to the flow that God intends for us, instead of trying to make it up on our own. Blessings!

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