There all the Time

"Howard!" I exclaimed to my husband.  "This GPS is so old it won't pick up Mark's address!"  I knew we should have had it updated long before this, but there was no time to think about that now. We were on the--up until now--pleasant drive from our son Jamie's house and headed to a suburb of Austin.  We had come this way many times, but always with someone else!

Well, I thought I would just program in a random address in their town that the  GPS would accept and figure it out from there.  When I told Mark that over the phone, he said he'd never heard of the road the GPS gave us, and attempted to give us directions. He said to stay on our route until we came to I-35, which was where a toll road began (at least that's what I thought he said), then go north.

"There it is!" I pointed out when I saw the interstate sign.  But was that going north or south?  I saw the arrow pointing north, so we took that approach, but it became obvious we were going south when downtown Austin came into view with huge buildings and congested traffic. Another frantic call to Mark, whose cryptic reply was, "Take the nearest exit and turn around." Okay.  But how far to go?

Mark told us the name of an exit that was near their area.  We were to get off there and he would tell us where his wife Rhonda would meet us and lead us to their house.  Despairing of finding the exit after miles of driving, Howard pulled off and asked a trucker where it was.  "There is no such exit," he pronounced.  We said we were actually trying to find their little town, which he said was about 15 miles farther!

Before we took off, another call to our son.  Mark said, "You must go to the exit I told you.  It's only two exits more."  This time we spotted it.  "Rhonda will meet you at the H-E-B that is about...let's see...five stoplights away," he assured us.  I counted off five stoplights, then we drove probably another five miles.

"We must have passed it," I wailed.  So hubby pulls off and asks a lady coming off a side street if there was an H-E-B (supermarket) near there.  She said it was just down the road.  We found it and called Rhonda, who had gone into the store to pick up something for lunch. She said she could see us out the window, to just sit tight.  Howard couldn't be still, however, getting out into the frigid gale with a question to bundled-up customers hurrying against the wind to their cars.

Losing sight of our daughter-in-law's car  only a few times, we followed her home.  After lunch with her and our grandson, we rested until Mark came home an hour or so later, and had a wonderful evening and a restful night.  The next morning as we were getting ready to go home on a break between snow and ice predictions, Mark mentioned that we probably have a GPS on our iPhone.  He located and pointed out the icon labeled Navigation.  We had never noticed it before!

We didn't need it on our trip home, because our old GPS worked fine for that.  But we tried it out anyway when we neared home.  We just called Siri, the automated voice that dirccted us precisely from a visual map along every mile and every turn we needed to make!  What a life-saver!  It could have prevented all our mix-ups!  And to think we had it all the time!

That's just like the Lord, I thought.  Ready and waiting for us to call on Him in time of trouble, and even with us when we are not aware of His presence.  Well, He certainly was with us on this trip! Our true Navigator through life! He was there all the time.