Sometimes, even when we are attuned to our inner compass, and it is oriented properly to its source, we can end up places we never expected, or places we don’t want to be. We can end up in the wilderness, when we thought we were making a beeline toward whatever we were expecting our “next” to be. What do you do when this happens? What do you wonder? How do you reorient yourself to what-is, rather than whatever you were expecting? In the 1960s, Max Renner conducted a famous experiment where he transported a hive of honeybees from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast, across three time zones. Now, bees have a built-in system of navigation that is based around the position of the sun in the sky. They can fly with uncanny accuracy to a distant place they’ve only been once – or even only told about (by a scout’s “waggle dance”). But they discovered that when they moved the colony to its new location in California, the bees consistently flew off course by about 45 degrees. It turned out that they weren’t just navigating by the sun’s location in the sky, but by where they *expected* the sun to be in the sky, based on their own internal sense of what time of day it was (which was now quite confused because it was suddenly 3 hours earlier than before they got on that plane). Have you ever had this happen? Some shift happens in your life, and suddenly you can’t quite seem to navigate properly anymore? Your compass still works, and you know it’s oriented toward its True North, but it doesn’t orient you in the direction you expected it to, or following it takes you somewhere you never intended to go? What if it’s still taking you exactly where you need to be, but your expectations based on “before” is what is making it feel “all wrong”? What if God is indeed “doing a new thing" (Is 43:19) and your job is to trust that your compass is orienting you properly, even when it feels so “off”? How might you lean into that trust, over your own expectations, today?

Posted by Jamie Bonilla at 2022-01-20 15:14:55 UTC