I used to believe that spiritual maturity looked like a steady climb—a clean, unwavering trajectory toward Christ with no backsliding, no doubt, no days when I felt more lost than found. Every Sunday, I'd see it reflected in the testimonies around me: stories polished to perfection, journeys scrubbed clean of uncertainty. And every Monday, I'd wake up to my own messy reality and wonder what was wrong with me.
The gap between who I appeared to be and who I actually was grew wider with each passing year. I was exhausted from maintaining the performance, ashamed of the constant course corrections, convinced that my struggles were evidence of failure rather than marks of an honest journey.
Then I discovered something that changed everything: the wobble is not a sign of failure. It's the signature of growth.
For twenty-five years, I worked as an Air Force weather forecaster, watching pilots navigate through constantly shifting conditions. Later, I studied harbor pilots—masters who guide massive ships through treacherous waters to safe harbor. What struck me wasn't their ability to chart a perfect course, but their mastery of continuous adjustment. They make hundreds of micro-corrections, constantly reading conditions, perpetually responding to wind, current, and circumstance.
They don't wobble despite their expertise. They wobble because of it.
This realization cracked open the myth I'd been living under. Discipleship, I finally understood, is not a march—it's a wobble. It's the perpetual tension between conviction and compromise, certainty and doubt, zeal and wisdom. Every mistake, every correction, every moment of drift and recovery isn't a deviation from the path—it's how the path actually works.
The straight-line model of faith creates something insidious: a culture of performance where we hide our struggles, compare our insides to everyone else's outsides, and condemn ourselves for being human. It traps us in shame when we inevitably stumble, and it robs us of the freedom to engage honestly with the difficult, dynamic work of maturing in Christ.
But here's the revolutionary truth I've learned to embrace: you control exactly two things in your discipleship—your actions and your attitudes. Everything else flows from taking full responsibility for these. Not responsibility for outcomes you can't control, not shame for struggles you face, but ownership of how you respond in each moment.
This is where the wobble becomes real. When you recognize your personal wobble pattern—the particular ways you drift, the circumstances that throw you off course, the corrections that bring you back—you begin to see the Holy Spirit's navigation in real time. You learn to distinguish productive course correction from destructive drift. You develop the wisdom to hold tension without collapsing it, to embrace uncertainty without abandoning conviction.
The journey stops being about arriving at some mythical destination of spiritual perfection and becomes about faithful navigation through whatever conditions you encounter. One honest, responsible step at a time.
I think of the countless disciples who've walked away from faith not because they stopped believing, but because they couldn't reconcile their messy journey with the polished narrative they thought they were supposed to live. I think of the believers still hiding, still performing, still exhausted from pretending their faith is steadier than it is.
And I want them to know: the wobble isn't a bug in your discipleship. It's how discipleship actually works.
What if, instead of hiding our course corrections, we learned to navigate through them? What if we measured progress not in the straightness of our line but in the faithfulness of our adjustments? What if we created communities where authenticity mattered more than appearance, where wobbling together was more valuable than arriving alone?
The Christian life is not a march toward the Cross with seamless growth and unwavering stability. It's a navigation—sometimes steady, often uncertain, always requiring adjustment. And in accepting this, we find not failure, but freedom. Not shame, but grace. Not the burden of perfection, but the gift of being fully known and fully loved, wobble and all.
