For the largest part of my life, I have been a truck driver.
The earlier analogy of being able to trust a map is no small thing as far as I am concerned. I have found out the hard way the importance of correctly reading a map. Everyone gets lost once in a while and it is no big deal when you are in a car but it can be interesting, to say the least, when trying to turn a sixty foot combination vehicle around in an unfamiliar area, in the middle of the night, after being up all day and your eyeballs feel like they are dragging the ground. Here is how it can happen…
The first road atlas I bought was one of those printed by the big name in map making. I had a load going into the San Francisco Bay area, I was young and this was my first trip into the bay area. Having never been there before I was glad to have that atlas. My destination was Fremont, a suburb of Oakland. According to my interpretation of the map I was suppose to travel south on I-680 until I came to the Highway 84 cutoff; after traveling east approximately five miles I would then find Fremont nestled at the foothills of the Diablo Mountain Range.
Everything was going according to the map until I had traveled the five miles east on what I believed to be Highway 84. That nice two-lane road, with wide shoulders, had suddenly turned into a narrow two-lane road without shoulders and I began a steady gain in elevation as the road began to climb up the side of the Diablo Mountains. It was about that time that I knew I was on the wrong road and was seriously looking for a place to turn around. It was 11:00 at night and I had been driving all day and had been up for the better part of eighteen hours.
After a few more miles, that narrow two-lane road turned into a narrow one-lane road, with turnouts, and the uphill grade was getting steeper, with switchbacks. By then I knew I was in deep trouble and was desperately looking for a place to turn around. All I could do was keep traveling up and hope like everything that the road did not just dead end at the top…at a locked gate. In the back of my mind, I had the dreadful thought of having to be helicoptered back to sane roadway again, truck and all. Fortunately, some thoughtful highway department had created a spot close to the top that was big enough for me to back into, get myself turned around and return to the comparative safety of the Oakland area so I could continue my search for Fremont.
What went wrong? My first instinct was to blame the map maker for showing Fremont in the wrong area. After closer examination I had to admit to having mistakenly identified Fremont as being on the east side of I-680 instead of the west side. Highway 84, at that point, went to the west only. The road I took to the east was just a common, everyday road called Calaveras Road. Some of you with map reading experience in major metropolitan areas know how confusing those little dot things can be when there are a lot of cities crowded together in one place.
What does this have to do with searching for God? Imagine for a moment that you were God and you wanted everyone to know you were there and in complete control of everything that really mattered to the people on this planet. What would you do? How would you communicate with those people? Would you create a "map" to prove that you knew the road ahead?
It would be easy to become sidetracked here with issues belonging to other discussions. We could chase after every argument for how and why God does things, but the real issue here is why he does anything at all.
If you were God, you would shout from heaven. You would show yourself and make people behave because you were sick and tired of all of the crime, poverty and killing going on in this world. If you were God, you would grab humanity by the back of the neck, give us a good thump on the head to get our attention and show us those little children living in a war-torn country; all they have ever known is terror, killing and the insanity of man against man. If you were God, you would put a stop to all of the mess on this pathetic excuse of a "civilized" planet. You would start cleaning house and not stop until everyone was conforming to a standard of compassionate behavior; behaving in a way that supposedly intelligent, enlightened people are capable of. I believe that is what you would do if you were God. I KNOW that is what I would do if I were God.
May I make a suggestion? Maybe God IS trying to get our attention, only he is doing it in such a way as to make a more permanent impression on the human mind. Maybe he does not want us to do things out of a fear of punishment but out of a genuine love for one another and the only way he can bring that aspect of our character to the surface is to do exactly what he is doing, which is working with our hearts and not our fears.
Every day is a trip through unknown territory, going from point to point with a guidebook that was given to us by our Creator. That guidebook is there to teach us how to deal with the various people we encounter in life and it gives us examples of how our actions and reactions with those individuals affects not only them but also brings out those aspects of our characters that I just mentioned in the previous paragraph. In the process we have the opportunity to become like our Creator.
You will be learning the real truth about our Creator as you progress through this book and hopefully you will be surprised as you get to know that he is not vicious, vindictive and judgmental as you have been led to believe.
Getting back to the real question…If there is no God, then this book is pointless and we might as well eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow we are all going to die. If God does exist then we have to realize that he is obviously working more behind the scenes and communicating with us in such a way that will leave no doubt in our minds that he is there and that everything is under control.
How can I be so sure of all this? Well, now you know the real reason for this book. You are probably reading this book because you, just like me, have been searching for the big question in life. Does God really exist?
Here is where I have to be seriously honest and give you fair warning. If you continue to read this book, I believe you will have to make a choice when you are done. I believe you will be convinced that you are accountable for your actions to the one who created all things. We all have a choice in life. We can choose good or bad, right or wrong. Those who tell you that there are shades of truth are only lying to you.