Are we destined to lurch down life’s road from one pothole or detour to another?
Down inside we all sense that this was not the way of life was meant to be, and we yearn for something better. We suspect there must be another way, a different path from the one we have been traveling. But why do so few people seem to find it? Why have we missed it? Can life be any different?
The answer to that last question is Yes! No matter who you are or what your life has been like so far, the rest of your life’s journey can be different. With God’s help you can begin again. With Him you can confront your problems and begin to deal with them, and you can avoid life’s pitfalls and detours. More than that, with God’s help you can make an impact on our world. If you have never done so, ask Jesus Christ into your life today.
-Billy Graham from God’s Love for You
The Reference Point
The Pennsylvania State Highway Department once set out to build a bridge, working from both sides. When the two crews of workers reached the middle of the waterway, they were 13 feet to one side of each other. Alfred Steinberg, writing some time ago in the Saturday Evening Post, went on to explain that each crew had used its own reference point.
A small bronze disk at Meades Ranch Triangulation Station in Osborne, Kansas, marks the place where the 39th parallel crosses the 98th meridian. The National Geodetic Survey, a federal agency whose business it is to locate the exact position of every point in the United States, used this scientifically recognized reference point until the advent of an even more precise system, the global positioning system (GPS). All ocean liners and commercial planes rely on the Survey. The government can build no dams nor can it shoot off a missile without this agency to tell it exact locations – to the very inch.
The reference point (or GPS) for the Christian is the Bible. All values, judgements and attitudes must be gauged in relationship to this reference point.
“Location by approximation,” Steinberg’s article goes on to say, “can be costly and dangerous.”
