I should tell you upfront that I once got turned around in a Costco for twenty minutes. Not a large Costco. The regular kind. I walked past the same display of patio furniture three times before a teenager in a red vest took pity on me and pointed me toward the exit. I thanked him with perhaps too much sincerity.
This is the kind of man I am with directions.
My wife has learned to give me instructions the way you might brief a new employee on their first day — slowly, with eye contact, and with a follow-up email. She no longer says things like it’s just past the old hardware store because I do not know where the old hardware store is. I do not know where the new hardware store is. She says things like turn left at the light, then right at the Bojangles, then left again, and if you see a water tower you’ve gone too far. She includes the water tower as a mercy. I have seen the water tower more than I would like to admit.
I have lived in this county for fifteen years. I still occasionally have to do the little trick where you hold up both hands and see which one makes an L to figure out which way is left. In the car. While driving. This is not something I am proud of.
The spiritual implications of all this are, I am sure, profound. Something about humility. Something about the journey mattering more than the destination. I have preached sermons that could apply here, and I recognize that with a certain dry embarrassment.
But honestly, I think what it mostly means is that I am a person who needs help getting places, and I have had to make peace with that. There is something quietly good about knowing your own limits. It keeps you from being insufferable. It keeps you grateful for patient wives and kind teenagers in red vests and water towers visible from a mile away.
And it keeps you from ever being too smug when someone else gets lost.
I know how it feels. I have been there. I was just there, actually. Right past the Bojangles.