In the country I am living in, asking for directions can be a dangerous thing. Because the country is an honor/shame culture, it is extremely important to maintain your name and reputation, and through that your honor. It is very important to “save face”, to not do anything that makes you look bad. In this context, saying “I don’t know” makes you look bad and is therefore shameful. So…if you ask a person for directions, they will tell you where to go, even if they have no ideawhere said place is. :D You can get sent on quite a rabbit hunt just in an attempt to get to your destination.
For this reason, I usually avoid asking people where to go and just use google maps.
But this one time a couple months ago, my roommate Kylee and I were trying to find the bus station nearest to our house. We followed Google Maps to the place, right around the corner from our house, but there was no bus stop. We were checking Google Maps, when this nice, old man asked us if he could help. We couldn’t really tell him no without being rude, so we tried to explain in our broken language that we were looking for the Anit Street bus station. He clearly didn’t know, but he hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, then proceeded to try to convince us we should go to the nearest store and ask for directions. Another younger man walks by, and the old guy ask him if he knows where it is. This guy said Anit Sokak was to the right, but we knew it was to the left because we live on Anit Sokak! We just wanted the bus stop. We finally decided to head to a bus station near the metro because we knew where that one was, and the old man, who was walking in the same direction, came with us. He was still trying to be helpful, asking another Turk along the way where it was, and frequently insisting that we should really be taking the metro instead (which would have taken way longer). We get to the bus station, but there was no bus on the schedule for a while. Instead we decide to take a minibus, but the old man is still “helpfully” insisting that it really will be much faster to take the metro. This whole time my roommate and I are trying to think of how we can end this encounter without seeming rude! Finally, after we stubbornly but politely insisted that we did want the minibus and not the metro, he headed off to the metro and we parted ways. Afterwards, I chuckled to myself—what a crazy mess, and we didn’t even ask for directions!
Thinking about this later, I realized that while it is a funny cross-cultural story, it also can be a pretty good analogy for our faith. We have to be careful in life who we take our “directions” from. There will be a lot of people in this world that tell you they know how to get to your destination, but they may not always be right. As Christians, we must make sure that the advice we are following from other people is grounded in truth from God’s Word. We cannot be tossed about by every wind of doctrine, but speaking the truth in love must grow up in all things into Christ, who is the head (Ephesians 4:14-15). We must be careful whose advice we take and in whose footsteps we choose to follow. Make sure your guide knows the location before you take their directions.