AMERICAN FOG

AMERICAN FOG

Not Where We Thought

.

Fog-masked Glorietta Bay hid any landmarks that night as I brought the 25-foot Catalina under the San Diego Bridge.  The family, who charted the sunset-sail, fell silent as the claustrophobic atmosphere closed in on all sides. 

.

“No worries.” I assured them, “I sail in and out of this bay sometimes two and three times a day.  We will sail 200 yards past the bridge, and then turn ninety degrees to starboard.  There will be a lighted buoy a mile ahead, where we turn again and the lights from Coronado will guide us the rest of the way in.”     

.

If they had chartered a 27-footer, there would have been a compass mounted on the binnacle, but not on the 25-footer.  However, I did not need to take my handheld compass from my sail bag.  Instead, I posted the family on watch for the buoy and/or hazards ahead, and I concentrated on avoid the Navy Seals Training Base to port and the golf course to starboard.  Within thirty minutes, I knew we had a problem, because I caught a glimpse of trees on the portside, where the treeless training base should have been.  

.

Focused on the fuzzy blackness on either side of the boat, I had strayed off course, and then the faint glow of the bridge over our bow proved I had turned completely around.  No longer, the self-assured master of the elements, I brought the vessel about.  Then with flashlight and compass in hand, I guided us safely to the lit buoy and on to the dock. 

.   

Somewhere, in our human certainty, as Oswald Chambers warns, we will reach a place where God must say,

“Don’t be blind on this point anymore; you are not where you thought you were.  Up to the present I have not been able to reveal it to you, but I reveal it now.”

.

I believe his caution has more than a personally spiritual application.  We, United States citizens, have reached a point of self-confidence, politically, where we have mistaken shadows for reality, and falsely believed we would never wreck our own boat.  However, every indication is that we strayed off course while focused on the blackness on both sides.  Now is the time for the nation to refocus on its more noble goals.  Our national goal finds its simplest expression in two documents, the Preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

. 

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

.

Our Declaration of Independence gives the rationale behind concentrating on these goals.

.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  (The bold type was added to emphasize that goal.) 

.

Those documents describe a free people, all with rights protected by a government deriving its power from the consent of the governed.  The unique goal of Christian Americans is love of God and others, whether in a majority or not.  Christians need to conceder how to express Christ’s love in the furtherance of our national goal.  Honestly, our self-confidence has deceived us, and we are not where we thought we were.  It is time to come about, pick up the compass, and turn on the light.