Just Sit Right Back, And You'll Hear a Tale. . .

Somewhere in the mid 1960's my father decided he wanted a sailboat. Not a big one. Something like an 8' El Toro. He also decided to build it from plans he ordered. He bought wood, plywood, brass screws and fiberglass and started the boat. He finished the wood part of the hull and started fiberglassing the seams. This took a year or so, working weekends and such. Life and three children get in the way of sailboats sometimes. We then moved across town and the unfinished hull came with us. Life continued to intrude and the boat was still there waiting.

When I got into college, I worked on it a bit one summer. I finished fiberglassing the hull and started considering what needed to be done next. Both my father and I got a hankering to sail so he bought a Sunfish, basically a big surfboard with a sail and room for two. Work on the boat stopped as life, college and the Sunfish interceded.

As you can guess the boat never was finished. As a sailing vessel. Eventually my father, with help and guidance from my mother, took the boat to the kindergarten playground sandbox at the school where my mother was working. The boat finally was being sailed, through the Sand Ocean of many a child's imagination.

Did the boat do what my father intend for it to do? No. Failure? I don't think so. How can we presume to understand the future? That is the adventure of life and following God. Last night we watched Long Way Round. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman ride motorcycles around the world. Things didn't turn out exactly as they planned, but they did make it. The boat did find a purpose. We need to be pliable enough to bend with the adventure we call life. We need to view life as an adventure and a journey where the destination isn't the goal, the journey is the point.

I have to admit this comes at a time when I am planted too firmly and bending too little in my life. The adventure is more of a struggle than a journey of discovery. God, help me to bend.