Final Rule

My co-worker, Anna, and I took a day trip to the beach yesterday. Yay! Road trip!

We met at eight in the morning so that we could get there in time for lunch, which we packed in a cooler. She drove, I navigated. This was tricky because I had to decipher Anna’s scribbled-down directions. Needless to say we pulled out the atlases. (We don’t have a GPS.)

We were doing great as long as we followed the scribbled directions and checked it against the atlas. The two were actually coherent. But as soon as we started to second guess the directions and atlas, and went with our feeling instead…we got off track and in the wrong direction.

There needs to be a final standard. If all we have is our “feeling” to direct us…then where will we end up? If all an architect has is his “best guess” for measurement, what kind of house will we live in? Even the HundertwasserHaus in Austria–as deliberately crooked in design as it is–was built with precise measurements. And you can bet below the surface the foundation is straight and solid. There must be a Sovereign Rule, an authoritative standard by which we live. Why do people have a hard time with this (including many Christians), yet nobody has a problem with clocks, rulers, scales, or maps? Is that a double standard?

On a side note…I wonder if GPS will weaken our ability to read a map like the calculator diminished our skills in Math.