USA: Navigating unknown territory

Shopping surprises, the early days of cellphone map apps, parting the Red Sea of clutter, Madame Blueberry, and a handy GPS for navigating life's uncertainties

Believe it or not, shopping has become my latest pastime. Those who know me well just wrinkled their brow and nearly choked on their coffee. Sherry? A shopper? Who would have thunk it? I didn’t say it was my preferred pastime, it’s just the way I tend to pass a lot of time these days.

Since we first purchased our truck two years ago and started preparing for our life of nomadic travel, I have spent enormous blocks of time online, researching and shopping. After all, we are not only building an expedition vehicle from scratch; we are building an entirely different life.

Having very little space to store clothing and anticipating handwashing and line-drying most everything, we won’t be bringing the typical wardrobe staples like blue jeans, cotton shirts and sweatshirts. We won’t even wear cotton socks or undies. I have gradually replaced most of our wardrobe with merino wool and other long-wearing, quick-drying, and odor-resistant fabrics.

Although it requires a time-consuming combination of online and in-person shops, as well as a fair number of hours spent scouring eBay for second-hand bargains, at least I have a basic idea of how to shop for things like clothing, footwear, and compact kitchen essentials. I have even figured out a comfortable low-profile mattress, as well as an outdoor dining table and four chairs that will fit in a long, shallow drawer a little smaller than a typical surfboard. Like we learned in Psychology 101, I have schemata already in place to help me understand these categories.

However, my shopping in the last two years has in no way been limited to the categories which are already comfortable for me. My Google Sheets database is mostly highlighted green now, meaning I have already researched, shopped for, and purchased such items as a winch, a portable air compressor, aluminum scissor steps, kinetic recovery rope, soft shackles, recovery boards, a 180-degree folding awning, a porch light, 12-volt refrigerators, a diesel heater, a composting toilet, a ductless mini-split, suspension seats for the cab, and two colors of marine-grade bedliner that can double as truck paint. Although these things all fit into my current set of schemata now, they certainly did not when we began this project.

This coming week’s shopping task, like it or not, is to narrow down our choices for a GPS navigation system that will integrate well with our Starlink system and also give us emergency messaging and SOS capabilities when we are completely out of reach. I am baffled by the myriad of options out there. I don’t have any concept of what the features are or how the systems work. How can I compare systems when the write-ups for each feel like they are in another language altogether? It’s like I’ve never . . . navigated . . . the world of navigation before.

Monument Valley is one of the most spectacular places I’ve seen in the United States, but there is definitely no cell service.

You would think living through the evolution of Apple’s and Google’s mapping programs for cell phones would be helpful here. Remember the early days of cellphone navigation? Eleven years ago, Apple and Android phones introduced rudimentary navigation programs—early versions of mobile mapping apps.

I can recall the first time we used a map app on a cross-country business trip from our home near Missoula to visit my parents in Dallas, then head to the Baltimore Woodworking Show. Our very first experience with a navigation system—one that was still in its infancy—was a multi-day road trip from both north to south and west to east across the entire United States! That was a lot of front-seat marital stress. It was also a lot of unbudgeted money spent on data and roaming charges. We didn’t really understand the world of cellular data at that point, so we just left the map app running for the entire 3,000 miles. Our cell phone bill was atrocious. We heard about this thing called a hotspot, so we purchased one of those, then continued to run the maps program full-time as we zig-zagged across the United States, following the The Woodworking Shows circuit. More astronomical phone bills. Yeah, those early days were fun.

Constantly navigating new things seems to be the norm for much of humanity, throughout history. In fact, the freedom to not have to learn and adapt again and again is largely an indication of luxury. Apple has built their fortune by designing expensive products that are profoundly simple with virtually no learning curve. Nicer hotels have a concierge desk whose express function is to take care of all the details for their guests. That way, no one has to worry about arranging the many complicated tasks associated with traveling to an unfamiliar place. High-power executives and celebrities have personal assistants to handle all the mundane tasks for them.

Beyond scheduling salon appointments and dinner reservations, though, wouldn’t it be nice to have a pocket-sized navigation unit with turn-by-turn instructions for navigating the twists and turns of adult life and ever-changing relationships?

Imagine your phone’s navigation app directing you through life, perhaps via a discreet earpiece:

“Take the second used car you drive today. It’s the right one for you.”

(Did you hear that sentence in your phone’s voice? Good. Keep going.)

“In three years, put your home on the market. You will never regret the decision.”

“After you complete your degree, take an entire year to backpack around Europe. You will meet amazing people who will be important to you long-term. It will not be as expensive as you might imagine and there will be a job waiting for you when you return.”

“At the next break in the conversation, excuse yourself to use the restroom. Do not rush; your adult children need a moment to regroup and discuss this matter among themselves. It will be good for their relationship.”

“Before jumping to conclusions, ask him what that decision means for his current situation and how long he has been considering it. His response is not going to be what you might think.”

“After dessert, your sister will make a startling announcement. Nod slowly and assure her that your love for her will never change, then let her know that you will need to put some thought and prayer into your response before discussing the matter further. She is already on edge, having been working up her courage for some time to even bring it up, and you could both use some time to think.”

“At the next opportunity, call that one faraway friend you dreamed about last night and tell her how much she means to you. Reminisce and laugh about the adventures you have shared over the years. Listen to everything she has to say. You have less time than you realize.”

(Ok, you may switch back to my voice now. If you’re not familiar with my voice, you might scroll back up and click on the audio track.)

Wouldn’t that be the most helpful app ever? But alas. At worst, we muddle through life on our own. At best, we pray and listen for God’s voice—through the words of wise friends, through gentle mental nudges, through audible words like I wrote about a few weeks ago, through dreams, through the reading of Scripture.

When my children were young, I encouraged them to trust God to lead them, to direct them, to make their paths clear and straight, i.e., recognizable and easy to follow. In essence, I was attempting to instill in them the ability to be attentive to God’s leading when navigating the uncertainties of life, full of too many questions and not enough answers.

Of course, my early attempts at this were not as impactful as I might have hoped. Young children are concrete thinkers. I recall one day when I dispatched the children to the bedroom they shared at that time and instructed them to clean up the mess of toys and clothes and art projects strewn about the floor—a layer of clutter so thick it was hard to pinpoint the color of the carpet. After some time had passed, our oldest—barely seven years old—came out of the bedroom with an angelic demeanor, wise and responsible. Our firstborn informed us that our youngest was struggling to clean up their belongings, but the oldest had bestowed a little pep talk based on the fifth and sixth verses of the book of Proverbs, chapter three, the verses about trusting in the Lord with all our hearts and leaning not on our own understanding. In so doing, the wisdom writer predicts that God will be faithful to make our paths straight.

Confident of the effectiveness of the wise encouragement dispensed, our eldest invited us to come and see for ourselves. Upon entering the room, we discovered our youngest, a child of four, wiping away latent tears and grinning from ear to ear. We looked down to see two matching heaps of belongings pushed up into parallel lines, like the parting of the Red Sea down the middle of a great mound of stuffed animals and dirty clothes. When we looked confused, we were met with a simple explanation. “I twusted in the Lord, just like you taught us. See how stwaight my path is?”

Keeping a straight face was nearly impossible. I may have been stricken with a sudden coughing fit to cover my snicker. My child didn’t understand, but as an adult who can roll with a little abstraction, this passage from the book of Proverbs does represent the GPS navigation system we so desperately need as we navigate through the unknown territory of our lives.

If I am reading the proverb correctly, we are to listen and look for God’s voice, trust it to be wise, and then follow the path that seems to be presented before us. The only problem seems to be the part about discerning God’s voice.

In a noisy car, when the voice of the maps program comes on, the driver might need to shush everyone else and mute the music so the voice can be heard. In a noisy life, this might involve seeking out solitude, scheduling time with wise friends, spending time in prayer, and reading Scripture.

I will admit, I am off my mark when it comes to reading Scripture. For nearly four years, I have begun each morning by steadily reading through the Bible, a few chapters each day, starting over again each time I come to the end. But for some reason, I have fallen out of the habit this summer. I miss it. I definitely believe I was more in touch with discerning God’s voice and recognizing the path He opens before me when I was immersed in Scripture daily.

Without immersing myself in the Scriptures each day, I end up feeling unmoored, flailing in every which way. It reminds me again of the early days of cell phone navigation apps. Remember the blue dot that represented your vehicle and moved across the screen to show your progress? During that first year of road tripping with a maps app, we named our blue dot Madame Blueberry, after the Veggie Tales character.

When we drove through the maze of subterranean highways beneath Boston and the underwater tunnels leading into New York City, our phone couldn’t pick up a signal. ‘Madame Blueberry’ wandered aimlessly around the screen, not constrained to any of the lines marking roads, just flitting and fretting until we came up above ground again and the signal was restored. At one point, while we drove through the Holland Tunnel and the blue dot appeared to bounce and splash in the Hudson River above us, one of our kids blurted out, “Poor Madame Blueberry is drowning!” Without a steady connection, our blue dot was untethered.

Note to self: I must resume my Bible-reading plan. Without that steady daily connection, I likewise feel like the blue dot in a tunnel on an early map app—flailing and anchorless.

So, this next week, I have to resume my shopping spree, researching and eventually purchasing a high-tech GPS navigation system for our travel rig. Even though the cellphone mapping apps have improved ten-fold over the last ten years, we cannot just rely on a simple system based on a fickle cell signal. In vast stretches of the North American continent, as well as in many other places, the presence of cell towers is not predictable. Our system needs to be satellite-based. The learning curve for this decision-making process is steep for me. I am navigating unknown territory as I try to land on a navigation system. The irony.

But this purchase has me thinking about more than shopping. For my own personal connection to be trustworthy enough to navigate life’s unknown terrain—of which there is so much—I need to be linked to something more powerful, more available, and more consistently reliable than what we have here on Earth. How about you? Any tips for navigating well?