SETTING THE GPS

Movement is unavoidable. Direction is not.

A person can drive sixty miles an hour in the wrong direction and be farther from the destination every minute. Speed only multiplies the consequences of orientation. That is true on a highway, and it is true in a life.

After nearly three million miles behind the wheel of a truck, Mark A. Wittenborn learned that knowing where you want to end up and actually arriving there are two different things. Most Christians do not wake up one morning and announce that they intend to drift. We get busy. Distracted. Forgetful. Tired. We react to what is nearest, take the convenient turn, and postpone the correction - until one day we realize that our habits have been carrying us somewhere.

Setting the GPS gives the Christian life a driver's vocabulary - destination, current location, route, recalculation - across four stretches of road. Part I, Orientation, sets the bearings: north is not a feeling, and the map comes before the motion. Part II, Recalibration, is about returning - wrong turns, detours, dead batteries, and the small decisions that keep direction. Part III, Driving Wisely, reads the road signs, mile markers, speed limits, and load limits of an ordinary life. Part IV, A Changing Landscape, travels through changing terrain without changing north.

A GPS can tell you that you missed a turn without shaming you for being human. Correction is not condemnation. Repentance is not humiliation. The right response to discovering that we are off course is not to sit beside the road arguing with the map. It is to turn.

Each of the twenty-two chapters closes with a Road Check - questions to locate yourself honestly and choose the next faithful step - and the appendices add thirty days of recalibration, a weekly route review, and Scripture bearings for common road conditions. The goal was never speed. The goal was faithfulness.