It was back in the day of big over the lap Rand McNally Maps. One lay across my legs while I sat shotgun on the front bench seat of our 1966 Chevy Impala. Across the two big pages, lines squiggled up and down, back and forth over pale colors of blue, yellow, and red.
I imagined our car, in minute form, following one of them. I just wasn’t sure which one of them.
“Where are we?” my husband asked with a thin vein of impatience running through the question.
I was supposedly the navigator, but often found the job as un-instinctive to my nature as anything could possibly be. I was the cause of numerous unplanned detours and missed turnoffs that took us hours off track. I bowed my head over the giant map, and followed our route with my finger, trying to figure out just where we were in that cobweb of lines.
From the back seat a voice responded with the wisdom of a two-year-old.
“We’re here.”
I turned to look at our blue-eyed curly blonde haired intellectual strapped into the no-way-would-it-meet-regulations-today-carseat.
My husband raised his eyes to look at our little girl’s reflection in the rear-view mirror.
A little finger pointed straight ahead with confidence.
Oh there are definitely times in my life when I have asked God a similar question. When I have felt small in a vast unknown and wondered, “where are we?”
I tend to look for answers through solutions and relief. But, sometimes it is in the space of sorrow, distress, or deep hurt, that God clearly reveals where He is.
“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” (Psalm 139:7-12 ESV)
Jesus meets us where we are. He met Peter and Andrew on the seashore, Mary and Martha in their home, Zaccheus under a tree, a lame man at the pool, Jairus at his daughter’s bedside, and little children on a hill.
I’ve discovered when I, like a child, struggle with “where am I?” there is a purpose. When life gets jumbled, the lines from where I thought I was, to where I seem to be headed, go in the wrong directions. When everything looks like a map turned upside down, I need to remember who is at the wheel.
Within this place and time, when uncertainty and doubt trouble my heart, God reminds me, where He is.
“I Am Here.”
Like a child I again reach to hold His hand. And like One who always knows the road ahead, He bends down to gently take mine.
He walks every dark road I travel providing assurance that He is there alongside. I am seen. In every place, and in all seasons of life, His presence is with me.
“…even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.”
I smile as I remember that little finger pointed so obviously at the spot in which our car traveled. And I smile now, as I am comforted once again.
He is with me. He is right here.
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