🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

Merchant vessel, The Nantucket, rammed into steamship, The Monroe, near the Virginia coast on a foggy January night in 1914. In the trial that followed, Nantucket's captain, Osymn Berry, admitted to many negligent decisions and was arraigned accordingly. The cross-examination of Monroe's captain, Edward Johnson, revealed he navigated with a steering compass that deviated as much as 2° from the standard magnetic compass. The trial ended with two burly sea captains sobbing on each other's shoulders with the reckoning that their carelessness and misorientation cost 41 lives.

Captain Johnson admitted he hadn't adjusted the compass the entire year he had captained The Monroe. It is a well known fact that a compasses magnetic north shifts gradually over time due to the earth's fluctuating magnetic field.

This week, I had my own moment of reckoning that proved I was misoriented too. When you're DISoriented, you know you're lost. When you're MISoriented, you're lost but think you're right on track. That was me, and the path was destructive. I needed to check what was pulling my heart, what I was crowning as "true north".

I wonder if God gave us the Church so we could help orient each other, maybe even prevent the most devastating deviations. You see, we have an enemy who doesn't need to sink us with a single blow. It's one secret, one popular opinion, one text, one look, one little comparison, one night, one compromise, one micro-decision at a time. The world's way becomes our way, and we don't even know when it happened.

But we're not sunk. Jesus remains "the way, the truth and the life..." (John 14:6) He knew what the world would say, what we would say, and He took it on His back. He prayed forgiveness for our misorientation with his final breath. (Luke 23:24)

Let the words of David's reorienting prayer in Psalm 51 wash over you today while you draw near to Christ. Listen to Bryan and Katie Torwalt's "Clean Hearts".