To give credit where it’s due last week I was at some meetings listening to Joel Smith who is the lead pastor of Daybreak Church in Mechanicsburg, PA. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Joel or probably to put it more honestly I didn’t look for an opportunity to talk with Joel but Joel said something in one of this nightly sermons that really got the wheels churning in my head.
Joel asked if our goal in life is to be a life raft of a cruise ship? To make that more present and less future it can also be asked, is the life we’re creating and building for ourselves going to be a life raft or a cruise ship.
Cruise ship- I’ve never been on a cruise ship but I heard really good things about going on cruises. I’ve been told it’s really fun to have so much stuff to do on the ship. Then getting the chance to stop from port to port all the while doing it while playing shuffle board and swimming the pool it just a really fun experience. I’ve also heard that the food is pretty outstanding and that alone is worth the cruise ship experience. Cruise ships are built big, they are built for luxury and comfort.
I wonder if for some of us the cruise ship) or perhaps the perfect vacation) is a pretty good description of our lives if we had everything we wanted. We’d have food available to us at any time that we didn’t have to prepare ourselves. WE would be denied nothing. There would be no responsibilities, no pressing needs, no stress and no worries. At 11 am everyday someone would come and make our beds and give us fresh towels, that is if we were out of bed already. The sheets are softer than we’re used to, the pillows more expensive, the soap exotic smelling and we’re waiting on hand and foot. Yeah, that’s a pretty good life.
Life Raft- I’ve never been in a life raft either. I hope to be able to always say that. It would make for a cool story, if I survived. But we’ve all read survivor stories or at least seen cast away. I used to watch Survivorman featuring Les Stroud, a Canadian survivalist. For the record Survivor man is much more hardcore than Man vs. Wild. First of all because Les is Canadian and not British so he doesn’t have a wussy accent. The other reason is that Les carries all his own equipment on his 7 days journey. Bear Grylls sleeps in hotels and gets his camera crew to pick up lunch at the nearest McDonalds (I can’t confirm most of those accusations).
So one of the Survivorman episodes featured Les in a life raft after a simulated boat sinking. He says it was by far one of the most miserable experiences of his life. Most of the time you see him survive rather well. He finds gross foods to eat and finds a way to boil water and keep warm at night. In the raft Les could do none of these things. He fought the current, fought to find direction and compass and he fought to keep his raft inflated. Every bit of his resources and strength went into surviving. Finally he made it to an island where he was able to find a way to survive a bit better but I can tell you one thing he didn’t spend one more second in that lift raft than he had to.
I can only assume life raft vacations wouldn’t be a very good business venture, where as the cruise ship venture seems to be doing rather well.
The catch is this. Cruise ships by design don’t save anybody. They can’t. They just aren’t built for that. They’re too big; the people that could do the saving are too far off the water to do any good. They don’t have the tools. In all their grandeur they simply don’t have the tool necessary to save people. Every couple of years someone falls off of a cruise ship. (See above with all the eating and drinking). The cruise ship never turns around to get the person that fell overboard. They call the coast guard. Most of the time the cruise ship doesn’t even know for a day or two that anyone fell overboard. It’s only when the friend or family member with them notices that it’s reported. How comforting and convicting.
But the life raft. They save people. They are crude and not complicated but they save people. So for the sake of saving lives we have to consider how we live our life. We really have to embrace and be the life raft if we want to save somebody…anybody. If we want to save people from poverty, from depression, from oppression, from themselves, from drowning in all the trials and troubles of the world we have to embrace living life in the life raft. As scared as we are if we want to save people that’s what it’s going to take. That’s big time. It’s not something we step into lightly, it’s serious but it’s necessary.
Cruise Ship or Life Raft?
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