Shipwrecked

"Cling to your faith in Christ, and keep your conscience clear. For some people have deliberately violated their consciences, as a result their faith has been shipwrecked." -I Tim. 1:19 NLT

"People never crumble in a day....it's a slow fade."
Phrase from the song, "Slow Fade", as sung by Casting Crowns

Adrift! Floating in the middle of the ocean at the mercy of wherever the waves and tide carry me. It seems the more I kick in one direction, the waves carry me in another. No land in sight. Nothing but horizons of waves in all directions. Hungry....thirsty....exhausted....weak....fighting giving up, fighting hopelessness....fighting letting go and letting the ocean carry me to the bottom.

I don't remember how I got here. Everything prior to the crash is a blur. Even the crash itself is absent of specific details. All I know is that at one moment I was sunning by the pool, drinking a nice cold glass of fruity tea, and the next moment I am desperately hanging on to a piece of the ship to stay above water. Looking around I see no one else. Am I the only survivor? I scream out for help in vain effort to hear a reply from another living life. My screams are returned with a discouraging echo of my own voice. I hear nothing but the sound of turning waves.

Waves are getting bigger as the wind blows harder. They hit me ever more violently, determined to free me from my only hope of staying afloat. I can't go on, I can't hold on. One more hit, one final blow. As the last stone drops a martyr to his knees, I am shaken free from my lifeline. Arms too tired to tread the choppy sea....I sink...gulping down ocean water with each descending meter toward bottom....I am lost, hopelessly lost!

A dream!...no, a nightmare!! I shoot straight up in bed to discover I had been swimming in a pool of my own sweat. No ocean, no violent waves, no brutal wind, no wreckage, no death at the bottom. Just a nightmare. On the one hand, I breathe a sigh of relief; on the other hand, I immediately, almost instinctively, start taking an inventory of my life. I don't like what I find.

My conscience, that internal GPS, if you will, was broken. When it broke, I have no idea. One small compromise after another eventually prohibited my GPS being useful as I navigated between the territories of Right and Wrong. No longer effective, the lines between these two lands became blurred....so blurred in fact, I could no longer see them. I eventually traveled between the two with ease, without passport or visa. Because my GPS was not functioning, I could no longer tell which land I was in. I crashed and didn't know it. How tragic! The only sure vision I had was what I saw looking back....nothing but a string of wreckage. Some was repairable, some wasn't...but it was wreckage and it was massive.

I had become the frog boiled to death under a low heat. Happily swimming around at first, then lethargic...just floating....no movement, then death at the bottom....bloated and weighted from massive intakes of water. Like the frog, I didn't know a crash was coming. It came. The fallout from my nightmare shook me awake....truly awake! Perhaps it wasn't too late for me to go in for repair...perhaps it wasn't too late for me to change.

The only prayer I could pray was: "Jesus, help me!"....the prayer of a desperate man sinking to the bottom of the ocean of his own compromise. No one but Jesus Christ could help me...no one but him could pull me from this death. I did come to realize that a life of compromise is no life at all. Jesus was willing to rescue and praise God he did! When he rescued, he did so completely. Apart from him, nothing else would have worked.

The verse above says to "cling to your faith in Christ". The word "cling" conjures up the mental picture of hanging onto something or someone for dear life, as if your life depended on it. That's what we must do, cling to Christ in faith if we are to navigate successfully between the territories of Right and Wrong. It is the surest way, the only way, we can keep our consciences clear....our GPS's working properly.

If you're adrift....cling to him...he is sure to rescue! Only he can fix what is broken in your life. What he did for me, he will do for you!! Blessings!