The Drift
Have you ever swam in the ocean and looked up to realize you're nowhere near where you started?
A few years ago, my wife and I were living in a beach town. I decided to try surfing. I'm a lifelong snowboarder and thought, how hard could this be? Turns out it's a lot harder than it looks. But it did teach me an important lesson about drifting.
The ocean has a current that you can't always see, but it's always moving. And when you're surfing, you often don't feel it happening. You're focused on the waves, on your balance, on not wiping out, is that a dolphin or shark, fine… and the whole time the ocean is moving you.
One day while I was out surfing, I experienced this. I became so fixated on trying to catch a wave I ended up almost a mile down the beach. I had no idea until I swam ashore and couldn't find my stuff. I wasn't trying to go there, I just drifted.
Every surfer knows the fix. Find a fixed point on the shore and look up at it every few minutes. A lifeguard stand, a bright umbrella, anything that doesn't move. Keep orienting to something that holds still and you always know where you are. Stop looking up and you drift.
I've been thinking about that while reading through the book of Revelation.
Jesus writes letters to seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3. Two of them, Pergamum and Thyatira, tell a version of the same story. Jesus opens both letters with a commendation. He sees what they're doing right.
Pergamum had been genuinely courageous. One of their own, a man named Antipas, was killed for refusing to worship the emperor. They watched someone die for this faith.
And Jesus still had something against them. They had stopped looking up. In the looking-down, they had drifted.
Thyatira was the same pattern. Growing church, real love, genuine service. But they were tolerating a teacher who said compromise was fine, that you could hold onto Jesus and still let the culture around you call the shots. Nobody pushed back. Nobody wanted the conflict.
The pressure was economic. The trade guilds ran everything in that city, your livelihood, your friendships, your reputation. Each guild had its own god, its own festivals, its own expectations. To belong meant participating. Christians faced a slow, grinding choice: keep fitting in or start standing out. Most tried to do both. The current took them somewhere they never intended to go.
And the same thing is happening today, it just looks different. It's the career that becomes your identity. The church service that keeps getting skipped because the week was long and the kids' schedules are crazy. It's the small compromises that don't seem like a big deal at the time. Nobody decides to drift. You just stop looking up.
What Revelation is revealing is that what we tolerate today eventually shapes who we become tomorrow.
Jesus says it plainly to the church at Pergamum: "Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth" (Revelation 2:16). He's not annoyed. He's urgently trying to show them they are drifting to where they don't want to go.
He could have let the drift continue. But instead, He names it, clearly and specifically, and leaves the door open. To the faithful in Thyatira who hadn't followed the current, He says something almost tender: "Only hold on to what you have until I come" (Revelation 2:25).
He's both serious and gentle here. He's not waiting to condemn. He's calling people back.
If you've been in a season where God has mostly been background noise, you're not beyond the reach of these letters. They were written to people who were still showing up, still trying, still somewhere in the current. Not people who had already walked away.
The fixed point is Jesus. Practically, that means getting into a rhythm of actually looking up. Coming to church not when it's convenient but as an anchor for your week. Opening the Bible even when it feels dry, because orientation doesn't require inspiration, it just requires showing up.
The writer of Hebrews puts it simply: "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another" (Hebrews 10:25).
Praying about the areas of your life you've been managing on your own. Finding one or two people who know where you actually are spiritually, not where you'd like them to think you are.
You don't fix a half-mile drift all at once. You just look up, find your marker, and start paddling back.
If this encouraged you, check out more articles from our Flatirons Spiritual Formation Team for practical tools, encouragement, and ways to grow in your faith and leadership. Click here.