Ever driven on a road with no signs? It can be quite unsettling. It is one thing to follow God when you know where you are going. It is quite another thing to follow God when you don’t know where you are going. My family has done both. We followed His guidance to our hometown to plant a church about six years ago. We stepped out in faith and knew where we were headed. Last summer we once again stepped out in faith and resigned from that pastoral role not knowing where we were headed. And we are still on that road. In fact, this “Road w/ No Signs” has been an even greater challenge to our faith. It has pressed us more than we ever dreamed. Our doubts and questions have been at a deeper level than at any other time in our lives.

If you have ever played video games, then you know that they do not come with instructions. You plug in the game, turn on the box, and then you start playing. You learn to play as you play. For those of us who are older, this is nonsense. I remember playing Monopoly ®, and Clue ®. The instructions were on the inside of the box top. We read the instructions and then played the game. But now the game is learned as you play. It’s experiential learning.

So it is that God is giving us instructions as we go along. We don’t have a plan for the future. We’re not strategizing about a new ministry. We don’t really have a clue about anything long-term right now. Sounds foolish doesn’t it? Honestly it does to me. We are simply doing the next thing in front of us. God continues to bring my wife opportunities for her business. I am preaching at a local church on Sunday. Bills are paid. Meals are eaten. And we still don’t know where we are headed. We’re just following with our eyes closed and our faith open.

How does one follow God when no signs indicate a specific destination? I don’t really know right now, but maybe, just maybe one day in the near future, I will be able to put it into words. But as for now, our prayer is still the same as it was in January – “Yes Lord, we are hanging on.”

When do we wake up? It seems like a horrible dream we are experiencing right now. How does one comprehend the murder of 32 students and teachers at a university without considering the possibility of it being a nightmare from which you will soon awaken? And yet the sad reality is that it is real. Cho Seung-Hui, from Centreville, Va., a senior in the English Department, shot and killed 32 innocent people before killing himself on Monday morning. No alarm clock sound coming. It is the world in which we live. Dangerous. Uncertain. Violent.

What do I as a Christian do? What is my role in this perilous moment of history? My family prayed last night for the families of the victims, including the family of the killer. Is there more to be done? Perhaps. News reports indicated that Cho Seung-Hui was a loner. He seems to be the kind of guy who stayed to himself. They also report that he had some neurotic tendencies. Most mass murderers do. Is it possible that nothing can be done to change certain situations? Is it possible that we are living in a world where we will simply have to live w/ the possibility that other shooting sprees will happen, that these kind of incidents will continue to be a part of our society? Is this the world we’ve created for our children?

Now don’t get me wrong. If you know me, you know I’m no pessimist. I think that some of the answers include more prayer. We are facing a spiritual force of evil every day. If we ever get time away from church activities, we should pursue greater involvement in our community.
More meaningful relationships with people in our spheres of influence will make an enormous difference. The bottom line is what Jesus told His followers – “You are the light of the world.” Christ Followers can be the difference makers. We can be light in the darkness. We can hope for the desperate. We can be passion in the place of apathy. We can be different. But it goes back to my first question: When do we wake up?

Freedom is the cry from the heart of America. We have elevated freedom to a level of worship almost. Some have taken freedom and pushed it to a place that no man ever intended. The founding fathers never thought that the freedom of speech could be used to burn the American flag, for which they and others died. Freedom is much more than just the simplistic definition of doing whatever I want whenever I want. That’s a distortion.

How do I know? Consider this question: Who are the freest people to have ever lived? That answer may take some thinking because you have to define freedom first. I think of freedom in terms of who has lived with the fewest rules directing them to the right and proper actions. Free people are responsible people and they seek to do the right thing in all circumstances. Well, who were those free people? Adam and Eve, from the Biblical account of creation. Think about how many rules dictated their actions. One. That’s right. Adam and Eve had only a single rule. Look at these words from God to Adam, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:16, niv) Adam and Eve was running around naked. Who called the police on them? They were talking to animals. It wasn’t against the rules. They could do whatever they wanted.

Imagine that for a moment. You can do literally anything you want to do except one thing. What a life of liberty that would be. Nothing would be considered off limits, except for one thing. Imagine if it was peanut butter or chocolate. Imagine if wearing orange shirts was the only rule. Imagine if the only law was a prohibition against playing loud music.

And yet Adam and Eve had to have one more thing to make life better. Just a bite from the fruit off of “THE TREE” would make the perfect place even more perfect. What a crock! And yet, we buy the same story. The results? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of rules in order to keep us free.

It was when Adam and Eve loved and trusted God the most that they felt freest. And so it is with us today. Our liberty is based on loving and trusting God. The Bible tells us, “It is for freedom that Christ set us free.” (Galatians 5:1, niv) Freedom is the pinnacle of our existence. Perhaps our picture of freedom is more than we ever imagined.