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Sunday, April 18, 2010

In His Boat

In the spring of 1957, I was given permission from my parents to purchase a boat. I was nine years old. For the then tidy sum of ten dollars, I bought a very used nine foot flat bottomed punt with three seats. The oars, which were the only means of propulsion, were included in the price. This object of my dreams was made of red painted plywood. It was obviously homemade, but of sturdy construction. I remember rushing home from school for days to give my punt a fresh coat of red paint and to embellish the sides with two bolts of yellow lightening. I stencilled the lightening bolts with masking tape and absurdly marked my boat as lightening fast, which it most definitely was not! We lived across the road from a large lake and I watched with great anticipation as the ice melted from the lake that spring.

As strange as it may sound in this day and age, I was given brief but effective instructions on boat safety, a practice run with my father in the rear seat and then set free for the independent use of my boat with my parents’ specific permission in consideration of the weather conditions on any given day. Wearing a life jacket was mandatory only when the water was cold, otherwise it could remain within reach because I had learned to swim. For four years that punt was used for fishing, exploring islands and deserted shoreline, swimming and diving in search of lures lost by other fishermen. I was in that boat a great deal until I purchased my second plywood boat which was larger and powered by a twenty horsepower Elgin outboard motor. The cost of my second used boat, not including the outboard motor purchased by my father, was twenty dollars. Fifty-three years later, I marvel at the trust and faith given our generation by our parents and indeed the maturity level we achieved as a result at a very young age. I suspect that the parents of today would wonder why the Children’s Aid Society was not called to report the endangerment of a child. In Mark 4: 36-41, we are given another lesson on trust and faith by Jesus who happens also to be aboard a boat.

36 Now when they had left the multitude, they took Him along in the boat as He was. And other little boats were also with Him.

37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that it was already filling.

38 But He was in the stern, asleep on a pillow. And they awoke Him and said to Him, "Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?"

39 Then He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.

40 But He said to them, "Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?"

41 And they feared exceedingly, and said to one another, "Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him!"

Jesus in chapter four is quite literally forced into a boat on the shoreline in order to be able to preach to the pressing crowd. He sits in the boat and preaches through parables. It is very interesting to see Jesus as the man and the God in this brief story. As the man, albeit a very relaxed one, he is able to sleep because of exhaustion through hurricane force winds. As the Son of God, He is able to tame the storm with three words. The disciples who had witnessed many other miracles of healing were astounded at His power to control nature. Jesus reminds them that we have to have faith and go to Him in storms. Indeed, I have learned over the last few years that we are always safe in His boat. The point is; we must be in His boat. We do this through our faith, trust and belief in Him.

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