On Following Directions

The 12,000 foot and higher platau and mountains around my boyhood home of La Paz, Bolivia, are littered with fossilized reminders of a day before we made written records. We make guesses, some educated some not, about the times and origins of these "pre-historic" creatures.

The boyhood curiosity and wonder of fossils has never left me. Now, as my own son reaches the age when he too is old enough to dicover the adventures of amature paleontology, I have begun searching for places to go and touch the past.

My search led me to the Marble Mountains about an hour and a half drive east of Barstow, California, in the Mojave Desert, where I had been told trilobites were abundant. I got my directions from Collecting Fossils in California at www.gtlsys.com. I thought I had looked carefully at the photos displayed by my web browser. During a Christmas break, a friend and I each took one of our children and headed for the dig. We were rewarded with a beautifully warm California winter day. We observed lizzards and hummingbirds. We gazed with wonder at the barrenness spotted by the early bloom of desert wild flowers.

We came away empty handed!

For three hours we chiseled and split every piece of rock in the location I believed to be the fossil quarry. I thought I had dilegently studied the directions and could not miss the site. We found absolutely nothing: not even a clue of "pre-historic life."

I revisited my information when we got home knowing that I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. And, indeed I had. We had found an old marble quarry road and what looked like a place where a lot of digging had gone on. The beginning of our walk had been made easier by this road, so we endured the steeper climb to the dig.

Our recent return trip yielded much better success because we followed the directions. As I thought about my mistake and success that followed, it occured to me how many of us are missing the point of life because we follow the wrong road. Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me." Sometimes we follow the easy way. Sometimes we don't pay attention to the directions. Sometimes we ignore the directions and chose our own way instead. The truth is that unless we take the right way, we will get nowhere. Our lives on earth will be empty and meaningless. Our lives after this earth will be "hell." Real success in life is measured not by how rich we are or who or how much we know. Real success in life is measured by whether or not we have a personal relationship with the God who fassioned the trilobite, the lizzard, and the hummingbird. True success in life is measured by whether or not we have a personal relationship with the God who Himself suffered human death to take away the guilt and meaninglessness of our lives.

The best place I have found for directions to Calirfornia fossils is Collecting Fossils in California at www.gtlsys.com.

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