What an Old Road Atlas Taught One Woman About the Hidden Beliefs Keeping Her Stuck
Kimberlee Herman, MSW, LCPC, is a best-selling author, Christian counselor, and host of Promise Hill, with 22+ years of experience and a heart full of hope. She mixes faith, counseling, and storytelling to remind you: you’re seen, you’re loved, and you don’t have to walk this hill alone.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle to change isn’t the road ahead, but the internal map we no longer realize we’re still following. Barbara wasn’t planning on a moment of insight that Saturday. She was just trying to get through the day. Divorce has a way of making everything feel slightly off. Not dramatic. Just like life doesn’t quite fit anymore.
So she wandered into a secondhand store. The kind with squeaky floors and too many things that used to belong to someone else’s “best years.”
She wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Which is usually when things find you. On a shelf near the back, she saw it. An old road atlas.
She smiled a little. Because who even uses these anymore? She turned it over in her hands anyway. Just like that, she was a kid again. Sitting in the car on long trips, watching her dad unfold a map like it was serious business. Everyone is arguing in the background. Someone is always hungry. Someone is always too hot. The usual.
It felt familiar in a way she didn’t expect. Then she opened it. At first, everything looked right. The big cities were there. The main highways. The places you’d expect. But then she started noticing what wasn’t there.
The Loop 101, she drove every week? Not on the map. The airport she now thought of as “way too big and always under construction”? Drawn like it barely mattered.
Whole sections of the city she knew by heart, places she had lived and cried in, weren’t even included. The old map was not wrong.
It was just outdated. She stood there longer than she meant to. Something in her shifted a little. Because it didn’t just feel like she was holding an old map. It felt like it was speaking to her. Almost like a quiet ache she had been carrying inside her was trying to speak.
These “aches” were thoughts about old expectations of where life was supposed to go and what she had been tolerating with various people her whole life.
It wasn’t that her life hadn’t moved forward. It had. It was more that parts of her still hadn’t updated the map. A few questions came up. Not loud. Just honest.
What expectations am I still carrying that don’t fit this season anymore?
Why am I handling hard things the same way I did when I was a teen?
What would change if I changed?
She didn’t have answers standing there between dusty lamps and a stack of mismatched picture frames. But she did have awareness. That was enough for the moment. Because nothing really changes until something is seen clearly.
Most of us aren’t actually lost. We’re just using maps that don’t match where we are anymore. The exciting thing is that we can change. Our brains can be rewired. Several neuroscientists have discovered this. Two of the more popular scientists today are Dr. Caroline Leaf and Dr. Norman Doidge. But let’s jump to the Bible, where this rewiring began. Read Romans 12:2. God created our minds to change. He is the one who put the fancy regenerative feature in us when we were created.
So maybe the real question isn’t whether life has changed. It has. The question is whether we have. What if the problem isn’t that you’re lost? What if you’ve just been using an outdated map? If this feels uncomfortably familiar, that might be worth paying attention to. Sometimes we don’t need more effort. We just need help noticing what we’ve been carrying without realizing it.
If you’re in a season where things feel “off” and you can’t quite name why, counseling can be a place to sort through that together. Or a quieter path may be to listen to the fiction-based soul care podcast called Promise Hill, where you can see parts of yourself in the characters as they unfold their old maps and learn to update their lives.
Maybe it's time to unfold your own map. Not so you can judge where you've been, but so you can notice which roads no longer belong in this season. Some beliefs carried you through childhood. Others helped you survive difficult relationships. But surviving isn't the same as living.
God is always inviting us forward. He doesn't ask us to pretend the old roads never existed. He simply offers a better way by renewing our minds one truth at a time. As He does, we begin to discover something wonderful. We were never meant to stay where the map ended. There is still more of the journey ahead.
Read more from Kimberlee Herman
Kimberlee Herman, Clinical Pastoral Counselor
Kimberlee Herman, MSW, LCPC, is a best-selling author and Christian counselor with over 22 years of experience helping people find healing and hope. These days, she’s trading in the therapy chair for a mic, sharing a fictional story and soul-soothing tools on her podcast, Promise Hill. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts, and remember, you’re not alone, and Kimberlee’s cheering you on every step of the way.
