Drifting

The acts of Asa, from first to last, are written in the Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel. . . And Asa slept with his fathers, dying in the forty-first year of his reign. 2 Chronicles 16:11-13

Growing up, I loved the water and so, I spent the long summer days of my youth soaking in waters of the Beresford city pool. Years later, as an adult preparing to move to Minnesota, my one request was that we live on the water, which we’ve been fortunate enough to do for the last couple of decades. Like most Minnesotans, we’ve come to love our water sports, but honestly, my wife and I prefer to take the boat out on a sunny afternoon, shut the engine off, turn the stereo on, and . . . just drift. We don’t have any intention of going anywhere, but we don’t put the anchor down and so, even with only a light wind, we do move. As we lay there in the sun, talking, or maybe even napping, the boat drifts.

The movement isn’t obvious unless you’re looking for it. From one minute to the next we don’t go far enough to perceive that we’re traveling. If we don’t pay attention though, over a half hour, we drift much farther than we intend. We’ve never run aground, but if we weren’t careful, we could easily drift somewhere we had no intention of going.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like drifting is what happened to King Asa in today’s passage. When he first became king, Asa followed God with zealous intention. He rid the land of idol worship, and he inspired his people to follow God. When vastly outnumbered by an opposing military force, Asa relied on God who miraculously destroyed the enemy. Asa was a good king who followed God and his people were blessed for it. Later in life though, Asa drifted. He didn’t have any one terrible moral failure. Rather, in his success, he just became self-reliant. Later, when faced with another military challenge, he used the resources he had to recruit the Syrians to his side. That doesn’t seem like an egregious failure to me. It represented a dramatic change in his attitude and behavior though. Once, he would have relied only on God. Now, he just figured things out himself. Again, maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem to me that Asa consciously turned away from God, but rather, just sort of drifted away. So, God stopped shielding his people from military conflict. From now on you will have wars (2 Chronicles 16:9).

I worry about this. I don’t want to end up like Asa, drifting away from God at the end of my life. I want to spend the rest of my life following God. It is, however, my nature to just naturally drift a little towards following myself every day. I don’t intend to turn away from God. I just naturally turn to me so easily. Daily then, if I don’t want my life to end up somewhere I don’t want it to go, I must reorient myself. Daily, if I don’t want to drift, I must continually be purposeful about pointing my life at God. Otherwise, like my boat, I’ll simply drift away.