Captain's Log

Journal 2005 10 12
Captain’s Log

Above is a portion of today's entry in the log kept by William Clark daily as they traveled. How you take a compass bearing and make a note in a log when you are in a canoe with several other people and a load of gear always astounds me? Recordkeeping. This is something often overlooked by those of us living civilian lives or lives that don’t require a detailed record of our work. Military men and sea captains understand it well.

My mother’s dad, George Washington Bennett, spent twenty-eight years in the Coast Guard. Many of his early years aboard wind-driven ice breakers in the Arctic Ocean. He spoke many times of the legal responsibility to record all events in the Captain’s Log. Even the bad ones! He loved to tell a story of making an entry in the log one night after he was at the helm and the ship ran aground on a sandbar! He recalls that he understood the bad ramifications of not entering the incident into the Captain’s Log. His delight was in recounting that the handwritten entry was so small he hoped no one could ever decipher it!

I complain about having to keep track of business mileage driven to satisfy the standards of the IRS. In comparison to Clark’s records they are nothing. Today a GPS could access the artificial constellations that encircle the earth and provide a record accurate to within a few feet of my travels. What would William Clark think of technology that allowed him to push a button on a waterproof electronic device, push “record track,” and give his attention to other activities until travel ended for that day?

We may revisit this idea of the Captain’s Log and the reasons for keeping accurate records of your journey. We are most familiar with the voice of William Shatner as Captain Kirk opening every episode of the vintage TV Series “Star Trek” with the words, “Captain’s Log…..” There is One much Greater who keeps a “log.” It is the one we need to consider. It’s entries are complete. They are forever.

Are we willing to look at a log of our day? Our week? Our month? Year? Life? Any entries you would like altered, removed or added? There are logs spoken of in Heaven, one of them the Book of Life where it is said an entry is made of all the acts of every person that has ever lived. There is only one way that an entry is altered in that book. The Book of Life will be used for judgment at the end of the ages. If you have come to faith in Jesus Christ through the shed blood of the Lamb of God then the entry is a red, blood soaked smear with a note directing the reader that the record is now transferred to the Lamb’s Book of Life. And in the Lamb’s Book of Life all the “bad” stuff is placed “under the blood of the Lamb,” blotted out and later burned away “as chaff.” What remains are the works deserving of eternal reward. Where is your name, your life, recorded? In the Captain’s Log awaiting judgment or in the Log of the only One able to blot out a record of sin and enter your name in His Book of Mercy and Life?