I had just left a job, a place, and a community where I had been for seven years and thought I’d be for the remainder of my life. I knew why I needed to leave and what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. During this time, while walking into a hardware store, a friend called me. I stood just inside the automatic doors for twenty minutes while Jeff told me a story that related to my current situation. Jeff, who had been a commercial airline pilot, explained to me one of the procedures that had to take place between the ending of one flight and the beginning of the next. While the Boeing 757 sat at the gate exiting its passengers and refueling and preparing for its next load, its navigational computer had to clear the past maps and errors and recalibrate for the new course. In order to do that, the plane had to sit completely still for ten minutes while it reestablished true north—otherwise its navigation would be dangerously off. This recalibration was an issue of orientation—to the geographic North Pole while factoring in the rotation of the earth.
While standing in the hardware store, I came to understand that Jeff was a messenger of God for my life that day. And I found that Jeff’s encouragement, along with my wife’s (who had been telling me the same thing), was a part of my own recalibration process during this new leg of my journey. The point was that I needed to sit still with God for a while so my heart could recalibrate to my true north—finding its orientation to the movement of God in my life.
