What follows came from my personal logbook over time. This was not arrived at overnight or in a vacuum, rather it was written down out of day-to-day moments of Insights, Reflections, and Interactions. This is God actively shaping me through the journey of life. Without a logbook of some kind I would never have been able to concisely articulate these thoughts.
1. About God — the fixed points
These do not move. Everything else in the five documents wobbles around them; they are the reason a wobble is survivable.
His character. Approachable, forgiving, just, loving, disciplinarian, all-knowing, and all-powerful are simply a few of the ways to describe God's character. He is my Heavenly Father and constant guiding force through the Holy Spirit in my life.
The gospel. Righteousness is something we have, not something we do. God gave us righteousness through His love for us — a way to be righteous through His free gift. The gospel is fundamentally very simple but yet we complicate it. We try to outthink it. We try to outguess the work of the Holy Spirit and what He left for us as the gospel. The gospel is very, very simple. It's the story of salvation: how we come to it. We are to share it. We are to live it. We are to obey it. It's that simple.
Identity in Christ. Strictly a follower, a disciple of Christ, and that is the whole of my identity. I am not a leader in any area of my discipleship life. Leadership is something that God puts in place along our journey. I should never strive to be a leader.
The authority of Scripture. I believe in the Scripture and do my best to follow it faithfully, especially when I don't understand the answers.
The Holy Spirit. He fills the sails; He is not summoned and cannot be earned. "The wind blows where it wishes" (John 3:8). I believe that the Holy Spirit is active amongst us and is available to help and guide. The full picture of how I see this is in the Disciple's Analogy. The reality is that it is the Holy Spirit who fills the sails, and we need simply to obey.
2. About the disciple
Discipleship is followership — a verb in ordinary time, daily obedience, not an arrival and not a credential. At times I believe that we have lost the art of followership. We concentrate so much on leadership and where we go and how we grab and gain that we can't simply be satisfied with followership. As a disciple of Christ, that is ultimately what we are: a follower not a leader.
The two controllable things in anyone's life. I control my actions and my attitudes; outcomes belong to the Father. This is a hard one to grasp as we move through life: to give complete control over to Him. It means that we must decrease our expectations to allow the Holy Spirit to move within us and control the outcome. We simply control our actions and adjust our attitudes as He helps us, and His are the results, not ours.
The wobble is diagnostic, not failure. The signal is the gift; drift nobody corrects is the failure. When we look only to people for direction, our current position gets judged by them, and a wobble becomes a verdict. The Holy Spirit loves us unconditionally and still corrects — there are consequences — but under Him it stays what it is: a wobble, back and forth, something to adjust our actions and attitudes by as we follow Him. Not something to be judged by others.
Prayer is turned inward first. Intercessory prayer has become kind of like an easy button within our lives and within the church life. The better way to do this is to turn the prayers and ask for change in our own life and see where we are while being intercessory. Prayer still has its place, is essential, and is called for, and I'm not discounting that at all.
What I am saying is that we need to look within to change within because those are the only things that we control: within ourselves. We can't control anyone else but we should pray and intercede for others. We should also first pray for ourselves and how we need to change and be aware of the gaps, the wobbles that we have in our life as we move forward.
Growth is measured in years. The goal is not to stop wobbling but to shrink the amplitude — catch drift sooner, recover faster. "Not that I have already obtained this… but I press on" (Phil 3:12). As someone who is further down the road from a physical age and who has been following Christ for a long time, I can really see this in ways that I could not as a young man. We should always be maturing on this side of heaven. We will never get mature, as some people say we need to mature. We need to be maturing and we need to understand the difference between those and that can only be realized over time. The idea that we could arrive as mature Christians, I believe, is not a valid concept. I believe that we should always be hungry and eager to serve and follow and be maturing until we leave this earth.
3. About the church and other people
The church is an aid to discipleship, not the owner of it. This came out of my logbook one morning, unplanned. I have said it many ways, but this is the most concise:
"We need to share the approach: that it is an internal wrestling, struggling, with each individual believer. We are not just corporate drones, so to speak. The church is not responsible for our discipleship. It is to be there as an aid. I've said that for decades now, but this is the strongest that I have felt it: that I have a responsibility to evangelize that."
We are not built to navigate alone. Community over independence — the parts of yourself you cannot see are the parts someone else has to name; the pilot comes alongside and climbs off. This one has been tough and a struggle for me and still is at times.
Who do we allow in our lives? Who can we be transparent with? Who can know our deepest thoughts and prayers and keep them confidential? Then we can be secure in that confidence that it's not going to be turned into gossip.
This is a very difficult one but it is essential. Christ had his followers as disciples. Paul planted churches. We need to be involved in church. We need to be active disciples but we cannot do that in a void, alone as individuals.
Leaders are followers first. We are all followers first, leaders second, because of the role — more the role, not the position — that He has chosen for some within the church.
4. About the work of Pilocon — convictions held as firmly
The instrument is not the practice. A notebook is enough. Piloted connections is what Pilocon stands for and I try to do my best to provide agnostic tools, in the way that you can use analog, you can use digital, you can use whatever software you want. It's that approach that I'm trying to be: it's the practice not the instrument. That's what we're trying to do, provide you with tools, and prompt you to ask questions of yourself and your practice instead of focusing on a specific tool touted as the end all.
Your data is yours. A discipleship log is the least shareable record a person keeps, and its privacy is a precondition for its honesty. Local by default. The only way true discipleship works is through confidentiality and transparency. If you don't feel like you have that, whether it's in an analog notebook that you keep secure or in your computer (not online but in a local file that is behind a password-protected area that you have that only you can get to), you have to be able to be transparent within these logs, within this life journey.
Scripture in a translation people can freely share. Whenever I publish anything you'll notice that I use the Berean Standard Bible, or the BSB. The reason for that is quite simple: it is open text and it is free and available to publish and to share anywhere so there are no copyright restrictions on it.
You need to study and to do things in your version of the Bible that you are most comfortable with. I have mine set up for my version and that is not BSB. You should be open to looking at changes but you need to understand why you use the version of the Bible that you use. It needs to be able to be freely shared. That is why I use the BSB to publicly publish things.
Questions before testimony. The voice is to ask and seek — not to tell, and not to share human wisdom. This page is the one deliberate exception.
Consistency over intensity. I am a firm believer in consistency over intensity. As I have shared in other books and writings, this bears out over time. We cannot do a "hero session" that will fix everything. We can't fix sin in one day that took years to develop. Yes the Holy Spirit can heal us immediately and I'm not discounting that but the way that I see my wobble is consistency over time, not with big surges that create high waves and very low lows. We need to be consistent as much as we can. The log that I keep with the Disciples Compass helps me to do that.
The Compass points toward Christ; everything else takes its bearing from there.