The Disciple's Compass

What do you actually do tomorrow morning, when you have a heading to hold and a whole ordinary day in front of you?

The Disciple’s Compass is my answer. It isn’t a program, and it isn’t an app. It’s a practice made of four bearings, and you run them as a loop, not a ladder. You don’t graduate from one bearing to the next. You go around them daily for the rest of your life, and that is how the formation happens. Think of it as a log, not a journal. A line is enough.

The four bearings

1. Follow by obeying. Do one clear act of obedience today. Skip the grand one you’ve been saving for when conditions are right. Do the next one, the one you can see from where you’re standing.
2. Log what you hear and what surfaces. Write down what you heard from someone else, what the Holy Spirit is showing you about yourself, and what happened. Most days, one line of each is enough.
3. Identify the current wobble. Recognize the tension you’re in before it becomes a direction. It will be conviction and compromise, certainty and doubt, or zeal and wisdom.
4. Course correct. Make small turns, and make them often. Repent where repentance is owed, reorient, and go back to bearing one.

The rhythm

The practice costs about as much time as a cup of coffee. Spend ten minutes in the morning on bearings one and three. Spend five minutes in the evening on two and four, and make sure tomorrow’s page exists before you go to sleep. Once a week, take half an hour to read the seven days as one conversation. Missed days roll forward. There’s no streak and no penalty. Nothing is owed, and nothing has to be filled in after the fact.

What it’s made of

It doesn’t matter. The instrument is not the practice. A paper notebook is entirely sufficient. So is a notes app or a folder of plain documents. I keep mine in plain text files that an AI assistant reads, and that has changed how I keep the practice. But AI is an amplifier, not the engine. It multiplies what an honest log already holds. It can’t keep the log for you, and the practice doesn’t need it.

Your log belongs to you. It’s the least shareable record a person keeps: confessions, doubts, prayers, and the honest acknowledgment of a wobble. I’ll never ask to see yours.

Where to go from here

• Start tomorrow with a pen. This walks through the day’s page, field by field. A notebook is enough.
• The analog Disciple’s Compass. This is the practice on paper, as a complete edition. It’s in progress for Fall 2026.
• The Disciple’s Compass, in full. This is the whole of the How, including how I run my own. It’s part of the Foundation at Pilocon.

The needle points to Christ. The instrument is just how I keep looking at the needle.