On Wednesday NPR aired a story titled “For Turtles, the Earth’s Magnetism is A Built-In GPS.” The basic discovery is that turtles use the earth’s magnetic pull to navigate to feeding grounds. This is an inherent trait to the turtles, they are born with the ability to navigate the ocean based on an ability to locate the magnetic pull of the North Pole. Depending on where they are, they are able to figure out how to get to rich food sources.
Turtles come wired with an instinct for survival. They don’t have to do anything special to act on this trait. The story ends with the pithy line that “other animals besides turtles are using magnetic fields to tell them where they are. But humans probably aren’t one of them — hence the popularity of GPS systems.”
This got me to thinking … I think humans do come with our own GPS, but ours is a God Positioning System.
Isn’t this pretty similar to how each of us is wired for following our own passions? We come into this world already wired with the inherent knowledge of knowing what we love to do. We were created with an ability to find our way in the world, based on following those things we love. We don’t have to do anything special or extra to follow this beacon. We just react to love. Sometimes it takes the time to slow down and listen to your heart. Sometimes it takes re-evaluating and re-directing.
I felt inspired on Wednesday thinking about how we’re really like all of those little turtles, wired and ready to follow our life wherever we should go.