The Drift: Why Good Christians Wake Up Far From God

'Lest at any time we should let them slip' — the word carries the picture of a boat that was never untied, but was never secured either. No one decided to leave the dock. The current simply did what currents do.

Drift has three properties worth knowing. It is passive — it requires no decision, only the absence of one. It is gradual — no single day looks different from the one before. And it is invisible from inside the boat — you can only see it by fixing on something that is not moving.

That last property is why self-assessment fails. You cannot detect drift by asking yourself how you feel about God, because your sense of normal drifts with you. You detect it by comparing against fixed points: what scripture says, what you believed a year ago, what a trusted person observes.

The remedy in Hebrews is not effort. It is attention — 'give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard.' Drift is cured by re-anchoring, not by rowing harder.

Practically: re-anchor daily with something fixed and external, not with how you feel. Re-anchor weekly with people who knew you before. And re-anchor seasonally by reading back your own journal, which is the only honest record of where you actually were.

If you have drifted, notice that the story of the prodigal contains no lecture. The father runs. Distance created over years is closed in an afternoon when someone gets up and goes home.