To drift or not to drift
When I first think about the music of John Prine who passed away this week, I naturally think about the music of Neil Young. When I think about Neil Young, I think about heading toward my alma mater Nottoway Senior High School to sing a song in their 1st annual womanless beauty contest. I was listening to Neil’s Old Man while smoking a joint and thinking how stupid it all was. I sang Carole King’s So Far Away in the pageant and lost! My friend Eddie won! I didn’t care, because I was drifting.
By that time in my life I was already set adrift. My anchor had left me; he was already in Vietnam. His worldly words of wisdom were now out of range, out of my ear, and out of my mind. Although my father’s words an counsel were always purely secular, they seemed t keep me on a type of course.
Now out of his sphere of influence for the second time in my life, his anchor no longer held me. The first time was his one-year stint in Korea in 1968 and 1969. Back then, I had been so freaked out about pleasing him that everything I did was to make him proud of me upon his return. Now that I was a little order, I just made life up as I went along.
In Hebrews the second chapter, Paul was writing to the Jewish Christians to bring attention to a critical principle in Kingdom living. He alerted them to the face that when God speaks through His Word and it is unheeded, disregarded or ignored, there will be consequences to deal with. Hebrews 2:1-3 says, “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard so that we do not drift away. For since the message spoken through angels was binding, every violation and disobedience receives its just punishment. How shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?”
Drifting away from His truth ushers in consequences, indeed! All are painful, some are dire, and some are deadly. Life circumstances, no matter how challenging or hopeless they may seem, are never a reason for the believer to release themselves from the Rock and to allow even the most incremental amount of spiritual drifting to take place. Any movement off of the true Center will begin to cause alignment issues to show themselves at some point.
In the construction of the largest hotel at the time in the world, the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, the engineers had to come up with a solution to offset the destructive vibrating movement of wind that would create catastrophic damage to the integrity of the structure and design of this wonder of the ages! This aerial plague of wind damage is called vortex shedding, which creates mini-tornadoes and could conceivably bring this architectural marvel down to its knees and into the surf! Their solution? An engineering marvel called tuned mass dampers that would transfer the deadly vibrations to themselves and absorb the vibrations themselves and remove the threat of destruction. Without those massive stabilizers, their hotel would be vulnerable enough to fall prey to nature’s most unpredictable forces and completely destroy their most iconic masterpiece.
So it is with us Christians. Drifting away, moving off our Center, letting go of our spiritual reins, even for a moment, getting our eyes off of our Lord Jesus Christ, is never a good plan. Sometimes we do it and nothing detrimental ever really seems to happen, no visible negative effect. We then fool ourselves that we are okay and that it probably will be okay to disobey His Word in the future. Sometimes, when we are so distracted with life or even fed up with it, we say to ourselves, “Why even bother with the Christian life?” So we leave our faith on the ground and head out to make our own plan happen, when we just don’t care anymore. Sometimes we miss our old ways, forget what they cost us, and just shut our minds to the Word of God and to the things that matter to Him and go on to relive our old pleasures.
We Christians—as members of the family of God, His adopted children—know before we tune out His Word and lock out, air-tight, the presence and voice of the Holy Spirit, that we should resist whatever temptation is coming our way. By this time, though, we have allowed our initial drifting away to turn into running away, and then to running hard away in the opposite direction! Have we not yet learned, as those genius engineers figured out, that when the enemy comes at us, whether in thought, word or deed, we cannot survive the onslaught without wisdom that we currently do not possess within ourselves? Our true Wisdom is from above, not sourced from technical engineering manuals. Our wisdom is from a life-manual that is alive and eternal—our survival manual is the written mind of God Himself, revealed to our minds by God’s Word through His Holy Spirit.
Should we become so drift-conscious that we are daily evaluating our walk with the Lord to make sure we are both hyper-sensitive to our own sin and hyper-sensitive to the leading of the Spirit?
In these virus-laden days that are upon all of us, consider this for either the benefit or destruction of both ourselves and our families. Now is certainly no time to start thinking about drifting.
My father once told me, “I drink, you can drink. Just drink in front of me.” I was about 13 years old at the time. “I don’t smoke, you don’t smoke, ever!” I held onto his second admonition until his latest absence opened the drifting door for me, or at least justified my own wanderlust. When I met my other Father, I started listening to His voice and to His Word. All I could say then was, “Oh, what joyous happenings!” The truth of the matter is that, as Christians, no matter what is going on in this world, our country, our state, our city, our family, our peers, or within our own minds, we all drift. It is in our DNA, embedded in our own natural make-up as human beings. We all sin. It is not to the natural man that I leave these thoughts. It is with my Christian brothers and sisters, who choose to be filled with the Spirit of God and to overcome the world, that I am pleading now. Shall we remember God’s Word, its infallible and inerrant nature, remember the living, life-giving, God-breathed Word of God the next time our sworn enemy pulls us away toward Drift City. Our collective voice is a resounding, “Yes!” Stay focused, stay alert, keep getting washed and being anchored with the Word of God.
In Christ,
Dallas
Words of Life, among many: