Cartography is the art and science of map-making. In today's world of GPS, even the road map in the glove compartment is seldom used. Do you remember the maps on rollers in the front of the classroom, which your teacher pulled down and from which you became acquainted with your world?
We do not know the exact date of the first maps, some time around the time of Noah's Great Flood (5000 BC). In a museum in Turkey, there are supposed maps of the Antarctic before it was covered in ice (Piri Reis). Can one even imagine the early maps of the world, most of them guess-timations? It is like predicting the size of heaven, a cube of 250,000 miles and that is just the first floor (Revelation 21:16). Our earth is only 25,000 miles in circumference.
About forty-five years ago, a local school superintendent had left town to take a job in western North Carolina. Having considered retiring here, he had bought acreage nearby, and a friend told me that the acreage was for sale. My lawyer looked up the ownership on the tax records, I knew what he paid for the land. I wrote to him and offered him $1,000 more than he had paid for the land. The transaction was just that smooth, attorneys handling the entire thing.
At that time, I still had a shadow of vision in the left eye. One day, I went out and walked across the land, since I owned it, I felt I had the right to walk it. In a wooded area, in a far corner, I had came across something I didn't know I had purchased, a small graveyard, a wire fence surrounding three graves. It was at the very corner of the property, with no records of it of any sort, any where about the cemetery. There were three small gravestones, all three gravestones had the same name, one a child four months of age, a woman twenty years of age, and a woman ninety years of age.
I did a little detective work, called every family with the same last name as those on the gravestones. Only one black lady was acquainted with the situation, she said, “yes, I remember”, the older lady was a distant cousin. There was a house on the property, the house had burned to the ground, with the young mother and baby in it. The grandmother had gone to work at night, and was not at home, her granddaughter, unmarried mother of the baby, had been standing too close to the open fireplace. Her bed clothes evidently caught on fire, and in an attempt for her to get out of the clothes and rescue the baby, the entire house burned down with both of them in it. The grandmother, never recovering from the loss, wanted to be buried next to them. This accounts for the three graves, which everyone, seemingly, had forgotten. Like the unknown soldier's tomb in Arlington: “known only to god”.
Mere mortals do not draw their own road-map, God is the great cartographer, making all the decisions of your life before the very foundation of the world. If we drew our own road map, all of us would chose to be healthy, wealthy and wise. We would not choose the bumps, holes, crooks of our road, everything would be smooth, easy going, an easy race to the finish line.
Only the disabled can understand disability, only the blind can understand blind Bartimaeus who cried out to Jesus, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.” (Mark 10:48) Only the lepers could know the inhumanity of leprosy...your fellow human beings throwing rocks at you, required to shout “unclean” when approaching anyone. Can anyone imagine a man, lying, begging outside the gate, called “beautiful”, of the temple?
The horizontal and vertical meridians of your map have been drawn by the mercy of God, but you have the free will to make changes. Your battles of life, are not determined by defense alone, much depends on the offensive. If someone says to you, “there are too many contradictions in the Bible”, tell them to bring you a list. The one true road map on which you can depend, the one answer book that never fails, the one course of procedure which never grows old, after thousands of years, as true now as then, is the Word of God engraved in your very being. Think of what the world would be like if everyone followed this one tried and true road map. Think of the power you have in your very being, the One who made the world and everything in it now living in you, “the hope of glory” (John 1, Colossians 1:24-28).
In my houses, I keep radios on all the time, this guides a blind man around, outside, I am aware of every noise. When you lose one sense, you learn to depend on and develop the others. I simply cannot feel color. Today, a friend told me of a wild fox that gave birth to four kits (baby foxes) near his house. He said, “what a wonderful mother.” Blessed is the person that understands the road maps on which life must depend.
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