The GPS That Required Trust

In 2019, journalist Sarah Marquis spent three months hiking alone across remote stretches of Tasmania's wilderness. She carried a GPS device but quickly discovered something unsettling — the suggested routes often pointed her toward ridgelines and valleys that looked, from where she stood, like dead ends. Every instinct screamed to take the easier, more obvious path.

She later wrote that the hardest discipline of her journey was choosing to trust the device when her eyes told her otherwise. More than once, what appeared to be a cliff face turned out to be a narrow passage. What looked like an impassable river revealed a shallow crossing just around the bend. The GPS could see what she could not.

David understood this tension. When he prayed, "Show me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths," he was not asking for a map he could study from a distance. He was asking to be led — step by step — through terrain he could not see beyond. He had made wrong turns before. He knew the sins of his youth. And yet he lifted his soul to the One whose vantage point stretched beyond every ridgeline of human understanding.

The paths of the Lord, the psalmist tells us, are steadfast love and faithfulness. But we only discover this by walking them — by trusting the Guide when the way forward looks like a dead end, and finding, again and again, that He saw the crossing all along.