My husband has been on a 6 day trip and should be home tomorrow. Before leaving the Forest Entomology conference in Asheville, NC he went out into the forest to assess hemlock trees.

He frequently goes into Harvard Forest in Mass., setting up experiments and training people. One of the things he always tells folks is if you become disoriented, no matter what, trust the compass.

Sometimes you will be sure you should be headed in a direction other than what the compass indicates, but you have to listen to the compass.

The same thing happened to my husband in the NC forests today. He would have gone in a direction completely different than the one his compass pointed him to. If he did, he would not have been home tomorrow! Without a compass he'd still be in the forest, and I'd call the phone number he gave me and ask them to send out the search & rescue.

As he listened "blindly" to his compass, it struck him how similar the situation is to obeying God.

When we are out in the jungle, sometimes what God says to do is very different from the turn we would choose ourselves. Our limited reasoning functioning in the world around us would lead us astray.

 I agree that Christianity is a reasonable faith. One does not have to divorce reason from faith in order to believe (Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?).

What I am talking about is when the world around us with its present messages would have our conscience choose elsewhere, or when we ourselves would choose differently in order to gratify ourselves. Without His compass, His Word and the moral compass that it develops within us, we’d be lost forever.

Sometimes emotions and situations are conflicting and you don’t know what to do. Trust the compass, no matter what, especially when lost! It will never be in error. Isn’t that reassuring?

The needle points to Christ.