The GPS That Requires Trust

In 2019, a woman named Clara Mendez was driving through the mountains of western North Carolina when a sudden rockslide closed the highway ahead. Her GPS rerouted her down an unfamiliar gravel road that wound through dense forest with no cell service and no signs. Every instinct told her to turn back. The road narrowed. Fog rolled in. But she had no other option except to trust the device that could see what she could not.

For forty-five minutes, Clara gripped the steering wheel and followed each turn. She later told a reporter, "I kept whispering, 'Please don't fail me now.'" The road eventually opened onto a valley highway just south of Asheville, and she arrived safely — shaken but grateful.

The psalmist David knew that kind of desperate trust. "To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul," he writes in Psalm 25. "Show me Your ways, Lord, teach me Your paths. Guide me in Your truth." David was not asking from a place of casual curiosity. He was surrounded by enemies, weighed down by the sins of his youth, navigating terrain he could not see clearly. Yet he chose to follow the God whose "ways are loving and faithful."

Most of us will find ourselves on that foggy gravel road — in a marriage, a diagnosis, a career collapse — where the only option left is to trust the One who sees the whole map. David's prayer reminds us that the Lord does not simply point the way. He walks it with us, and His paths, though winding, are always marked by covenant love and faithfulness.