I like to borrow a term from the field of navigation to describe
walking with God. In navigation, it's all about taking readings from
known landmarks or celestial bodies, compass readings, your past
progress, and elapsed time, and from these data, calculating your
current position. Sometimes, when you want to know where you are, you
have no fixes on any known positions, so you employ a technique called
"dead reckoning." You determine your best estimate of current position
based on your last known position, combined with your history of heading
and velocity since that point. This is dead reckoning. I like this
because it reminds me that when I look for God where I expect to find
Him and He's not there, or I just can't see Him, one thing I need to do
is to "reckon myself dead" (but alive in Christ, of course). This then
leads me to recount the places God has taken me in the past; the places
where God really met me and met my need; the places I have been where
God was there too. Then I can look clearly at which way I have been
heading since the last time I saw Him - my last navigational fix, if you
will. And before I know it - there He is!
More than just an allegory, this process is a very objective analysis
that helps me to cut through all of the emotional aspects of how I might
feel about my current circumstance. I can perform this analysis whether
I'm "stoked in the Lord," crying out in anguish, or just feeling kind of
generally bummed. Dead reckoning is, for me, an absolutely essential
part of walking with God.
Please note that what I'm talking about is not the same thing as
"getting S outta there and moving C to the center," if you know what I
mean - and I think you do. I'm not talking about extinguishing my Self,
or putting Self down, or suppressing Self. This was a bunch of stuff
that was taught to us in the Assembly with an improper emphasis on
things like conformity to someone else's preconceived idea of godliness,
among other wrong ideas.