How to Keep Heading in the Right Direction

eDevotion

Encouragement for your daily walk with God

Some time ago a newspaper headline read, “MISSING HYPHEN BLAMED IN ROCKET FAILURE.” ["For Want of Hyphen Venus Rocket Is Lost", New York Times, July 27, 1962, as quoted in RISKS Digest, Vol 5, Issue #66.] 

The article told the story of how one small, accidentally omitted hyphen, caused the destruction of the Mariner R-1’s Atlas-Agena Rocket. On the day in question, a Venus space probe launch vehicle, boosted by an eighteen-million-dollar U.S. Atlas rocket, was lost because a hyphen was missing from a mathematical, programming equation.

Richard Morrison, a NASA official, told the House Space Committee investigating the incident that the missing hyphen caused a mathematical miscue. Morrison explained, “The hyphen gives a cue for the spacecraft to ignore the data the computer feeds it until radar contact is once again restored. When that hyphen is left out, false information is fed into the spacecraft control systems. In this case, the computer fed in the command, ‘HARD LEFT, NOSE DOWN,’ and the vehicle obeyed.” 

There are some important “hyphens” that belong in our lives as well. When omitted from our daily program, results will be disastrous. What are those “hyphens,” you ask? Well, here are three of them. TIME ALONE WITH GOD...

—to pray

—to read His Word

—to listen to His voice

Just a few minutes a day is all it takes to keep our lives headed in the right direction. Is your life a little “off course?” Are you heading for a crash-and-burn-encounter? Then reset the right spiritual formula—TIME ALONE WITH GOD TO... Those small adjustments will get your life back on track — or as the Bible says, on the straight and narrow path. 

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6