I am currently studying the book 1Samuel, one of the more consistent underlying themes of the text is to highlight what it means to “walk with God.” I always wondered what people meant when they said that. What did they mean when they said to let him guide you? Plus, if they wanted to use a good example of someone who ‘walked with God’ why would they use David as the main character? He lied, cheated, was an adulterer, polyamorous, and a murderer none the less!
The more you learn about David and his life, the more familiar you become with the grace of God. Despite all of his flaws, God never stopped loving David, he knew just how full of potential David was and how great of a king David could be. The most beautiful part of the book is how eloquently the author illustrates that all of David’s iniquities and transgressions were rooted in one ever so relatable trend. Too often he depended on his own understanding of things rather than looking to God to guide him. Every time he put God’s plan aside and took his problems on by himself, things never failed to go awry.
When steering the Tugboat, the easiest trick to holding a steady course is to find an object on land, then align that object with the bow of the boat. Once you get locked in on that object, it becomes easy to judge your relative rate of swing in either direction which can be easily corrected by adding a little bit of port or starboard rudder. Just as we do in our day to day lives, we all have little mondain tips and hacks to help us navigate through the day. Here lies the problem, sometimes a thick fog rolls through, rendering your shoreline trick useless. In this case it is likely that you may lean on the more technologically advanced equipment on board. A perfectly natural reaction to have, but here’s the rub. The technology is not intrinsically designed to be fully depended upon. They are for sure helpful tools but they remain just that. Without the ability to reference what’s on the screen to what’s happening in reality outside of the windows, you’re rendered fully dependent on a system that isn’t itself reality, but a reinterpretation of reality. While the technology is impressive by human standards, it is of course subject to failure and misinterpretation far more than one may realize. Lagging, failed updates, reboots, loss of power, scaling issues, the list goes on and on. The technology acts as a filter in which we attempt to perceive reality through, an example being “how we may think we are morally superior just because we are born in a certain day and age.”
There is however one device that stands apart from the rest. Your magnetic compass. Technology will inevitably fail, and we will sometimes lose sight of the shoreline, but the earth will never fail at being magnetic. That being said, just because the tool exists, this doesn’t mean you wont need to learn how to properly work with it. You’re not home free simply because you have a compass onboard. Learn from someone who has mastered the art of navigating with it. It even comes with a manual. Don’t surround it with items that will throw off its polarity. Keep it clean, and respect it. Keep it in the center of the dash in the wheelhouse and make sure it remains unobstructed and in view. Practice using it in fair conditions, so that when tragedy strikes it becomes second nature. Mind you, we are humans and error is inevitable. Your path may sway a little and you’ll need to add some counter-rudder to course correct, but you’ll have a mechanism to help realign yourself along your journey.
But if anyone is deficient in wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without reprimand, and it will be given to him. But he must ask in faith without doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed around by the wind. (James 1:5-6)