A woman and her husband were driving to a place they had never been. The husband said, “No problem, I can get us there,” and, with that mindset, he refused to ask for directions.

After about an hour of driving around and passing the same street corner five times, she turned to him and said, “Do you really know where we are?”

“No, not precisely,” he admitted.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“I’m still a little unclear on that.”

“Well, why don’t you just go ahead and admit that we’re lost?”

Without pausing, he said, “We are NOT lost; we are on a great adventure!”

What about you? Are you on a great adventure? People rightly joke about how men seem to have an aversion to stopping and asking for directions, but I wonder if there isn’t a positive side to that. Perhaps we have become too encumbered by maps, GPS, and Siri. As J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, “All who wander are not lost.”

So, when was the last time you got in the car to take a drive without knowing where you were going? Do you ever take a road without knowing where it will end? Do you ever go on a trip without planning every minute, sure of where you will stay, what you will do?

It isn’t really about travel; it is about traveling through life with an openness to discovery, new possibilities, a little adventure. To be perfectly honest, the problem with making our lives a little more adventurous is our need to plan, anticipate, prepare. To say that in a more honest way: it is our need for control. Of course, we ultimately control very little in life. When was the last time a single day went as you had planned? Perhaps it would do our souls good just to start down a road without knowing where it leads. Of course, make sure you have plenty of gas, and the tires are properly inflated, and there is protein bar in the glove compartment, and you have a map just in case …