Andy Borgmann's Blog

I love a good adventure. Although, unlike most people who like adventure, I hate walking. It's too slow. Most of my adventures come in a car. Sometimes they are quite calculated adventures, sometimes they are, lets say, slightly more random.

Yesterday I drove back from Hilton Head Island with my friends CJ & Andrea. What made this journey different, besides the baby being tagged along, was CJ's newest toy: a GPS mapping device. This thing was sweet. It could tell you anything you wanted to know: eating locations, altitude, speed, distance to destination, your future income (ok, not that). But what I realized on the way home is that it has the ability to take the fun out of life. Why? Because it negates the need to take a U-turn.

I don't take the standard way home from Hilton Head (which is US-278 straight out to I-95 and then on to I-16). Ever since we were younger we took a shortcut through local roads. However, I only make the trip to Hilton Head once every other year or so, so I don't always "remember the way". Usually this means I have to "turn around" at some point (thus negating the shortcut, but still adding to the adventure). So sure enough, this year, I didn't do the shortcut right, but instead of turning around we just let "Mary Magellan" (as we affectionally called her) reroute us and on we went. Now I didn't balk too much as this idea (in fact I kind of requested it) because life changes when you have a child with you and you value certainty more than adventure. But that is when it hit me, full lives require a willingness to make u-turns.

Sometimes u-turns aren't necessary. Sometimes God has the ability to re-route us to where we need to be with out the harshness of coming full circle back around to where we started. But sometimes, the only way to get on with life is by making a u-turn. Sometimes it is repenting from actions that shouldn't have been in our life to begin with. Sometimes it means treating people better than we've been treating them for years. And, sometimes it just means admitting decisions made were not the best, this doesn't mean they were "wrong", they just didn't yield to their expectation. It is these moments that one must take a hard look in the mirror and at one's surrounding and be willing to say, well, it's time I turn back around. But it is also these moments that should be seen as the adventure that we call everyday life. And being the adventure addict that I am, I am glad life takes a u-turn from time to time.