cale livingston

Here, the Sun Sets in the North

It’s strange how much your orientation in life shapes the direction of your journey.

You can commit yourself to traveling a certain path for many miles and if you find you’re off by even a few degrees it might make all the difference in the world. This distorted sense of orientation also complicates your ability to read maps or road markers properly. Everything becomes subjective to the direction you’re currently facing. Eventually nothing begins to make much sense and there’s these feelings of helplessness and frustration.

But how do we re-orientate ourselves in life?
How do we reset our bearings back to truth north so that we can find our way again?

I’ve been musing on the implications of these questions during my last week here in South Africa, and specifically in Capricorn. You see, every time I walk home from Capricorn I “head north,  straight towards the setting sun.” I guess that doesn’t make much sense though since the sun is supposed to set somewhere off to the west. But try telling my gut, my intuition that! Somewhere after the transition from Panama to South Africa my brain never successfully figured out which direction truth north was and so I’ve been living, falsely, under the assumption that north is indeed in this certain direction. So every time I attempt to use a map I’m faced with the reality of my error. How do I find resolution for this internal, almost unconscious, struggle?

And to place it in a broader context, this entire generation is lost in a sea of subjective, relative norths. I think if you let enough people wander around long enough, eventually some of them might stop to ask for directions. Everyone’s searching for the right direction, whether they admit it or not. It might not always be what they wanted, but it’s always what they need.

This same illustration serves as an analogy to our battle with our own flesh and sinful nature. While we humans are wandering around, convinced of our own individual norths, God is calling us to walk in the one true direction, his truth that leads to righteousness. Even the very idea that there’s this invisible magnetic field on Earth that guides animals, or us via a compass, seems dumbfounding to me. And yet, the same is true of God. I believe it’s only when we submit our lives and desires under the control of his will that we truly begin to go anywhere in life. Everything apart from him is mindless wandering, groping, searching. We lack true orientation.

So the next time you see the sun setting in the north ask yourself the question, “What’s wrong  with this picture and, more importantly, how do I correct it?”