How It Fits

Everything I have written about following Christ comes down to five short pieces, and they answer five different questions. Read them in this order. None of them repeats another; each one points to the others.

This is the order of discovery, not the order of logic. The picture is where a person starts because it is the first thing they can see; the last two are what the first three stand on, and most people are ready for them only after they have tried the practice. That is the order I came to them in myself.

The picture is a sailboat on open water. The harbor pilot who comes alongside and climbs off; the wind that fills the sails; the rudder, which is the only thing I hold; the compass that points to Christ; the wobble in the wake; the shore where most people stand. Every one of the four documents draws on it, and only the Analogy defines it. What fills your sails?

Who is the hinge most people never cross. They can see the practice and they stay on the shore, because nobody told them the crossing is theirs. Discipleship Agency says it plainly — the responsibility is yours, in the Holy Spirit's strength — and gives four precepts for taking it up with nothing bought: take the next step, not the whole path · arrange before you resolve · act in His strength, not your own · own yours, not theirs.

How is the loop: four bearings, run daily for the rest of your life — follow by obeying, log what you hear and what surfaces, identify the current wobble, course correct — on one page, built the night before, read back at the week's end. The Disciple's Compass describes the practice, then describes my way of running it as one way among many. A notebook is enough.

What is the approach in two pages: discipleship is followership; the Gap between the Sunday version and the Monday one is the problem; six areas of life read through the seventh; six principles, one per area; the wobble as signal, not failure. If you hand a friend only one of these, hand them this one.

Why comes last because the rest of it wobbles and this does not. God's character, the gospel, who I am in Christ, the authority of Scripture, the Holy Spirit who fills the sails — these are the fixed points, and they are the reason a wobble is survivable. What Pilocon Believes is the only one of the five written as I believe; the others ask. Read it when you want to know what the practice is standing on.

Where the rest sits

• The books are the pilots. The Wobble Factor and the series behind it come alongside for a stretch of water each, one principle at a time, and climb off. They illustrate the five; they are not a sixth.
• The logbook is the practice on paper — these five pieces are its preface, and the pages that follow are the loop, a quarter at a time.
• The Compass as I run it — the files, the rituals, the assistant that reads them — is described in How and offered as one way. The instructions for building your own are a separate thing, for the person who wants them.

The one sentence

If the five collapse to one line, it is the line on the last page of What Pilocon Believes, and it is the line the whole thing takes its heading from:

The Compass points toward Christ; everything else takes its bearing from there.

Read them in the order above. Each page ends with the next.