A funny thing happened on my way to the rest of my life!!

I wake up each morning reminded that all I need to face the day is a fresh breath of my Lord and Saviour and then to find my way to the coffee pot. I could live without my coffee (if I had to) but I could not survive without my morning jolt of Jesus. Then I turn on my computer and my  passion...writing. Maybe it's not a passion but an addiction. I can totally relate to my writing being an addiction because once I get going I really do have a hard time stopping. Even when I was a little girl I can remember writing silly little poems to my Mom and I would tell her, "I'm going to be a writter of words when I grow up". How is it that a litttle five year old can engage in such a complex thinking process years before I was even capable of surviving on my own? I couldn't wait to grow up and get on with my life. I wanted to experience everything. Still do!! Why is it I wonder we always want something we don't have or to be something or someone we're not?  When growing up I wanted to be a famous sports star....a movie star...I wanted to be thinner (still do)...I wanted to be older. I wanted to be eleven when I was six....then sixteen when I was thirteen..then twenty-one when I was eighteen. I finally came to my sences and now I want to be younger. What was I thinking!! I remember when all I had to do was crawl...come on think back...you too can remember those days. I had it made. I was carried everywhere. Grown-ups would jump to meet my every need. I perfected my whine at an early age. All I needed to do was whine a bit and the whole world revolved around me. Oh...those were the days my friend!! But I couldn't leave well enough alone, no I had to try walking, and at what cost. Falling over and over again until I could stand on my own two feet and then I could walk on my own. Then not happy again I decided I needed to learn to run. You get the picture!!

There is something inside us that drives us. Call it ambition, passion, rebellion, competition, independence...whatever...it's there from the beginnning. A God given drive to move forward, our souls crave progress.

Then a funny thing happened...well not laughing funny...but wierd funny. I'm all grown up now and like my young neice asked me yesterday, "why can't grandma's run". Oh man...the one thing I was really good at too!!  Actually I'm more than all grown up....I'm really almost grown UP!! I've been confronting my future lately. What is my future? Is there hope for a real future without my husband of many years? He defined me and gave me purpose. But hope pulls me forward into the future, whatever that holds. Where there is no hope there is no future. I believe hope is the oxygen for the soul!!

We are saved by trusting, and trusting means looking forward to getting something we don't yet have. Romans 8:24

My soul doesn't crave something from God, my soul craves God!!  ...and by the way... so does yours.

A PROMISE KEPT

A friend of mine has a sailboat named Promise and he has been promising me a sail on Promise. He kept his promise and took me sailing on Sunday. Oh how I do love sailing!! But I must admit that the whole sailing thing is more than a tad confusing. My question is why must they change the name of everything on the boat? A rope is only a rope when it doesn't have a function. After it is assigned a function it's name is changed. That had to be the grand idea of a man!! The rope that is attached to the sails to control their shape are called sheets....and when you adjust the sails shape it's called trimming the sheets...ropes that raise the sheets are not ropes..they are called halyards. Now I'm not a man or a sailor for sure but I'm thinking wouldn't it be easier to just call them what they are?

On the open sea the captain needs to know at all times that his crew or mate obeys his every command without question. It's a matter of life and death!! So with all that in mind you can see if the skipper's mate is given the command to "trim the sheets" she would automatically find the scissors and go to the aft cabin and trim his sheets. Aft...that the rear cabin in case you are wondering.

It's so easy to get confused with all the sailboat speak.

When the captain tells me that unless we get some wind we will need to be "tacking"...and from what I understood from him it is hard work and something he really doesn't want to do. So explain Captain sir...what is tacking? Unless I have a weakling for a skipper I'm reasonably sure it has nothing to do with tacks on a bulletin board. Tacking is the act of changing the direction of the sailboat by heading the bow into the wind and it requires a zigzag motion in the water. Then when the Captain asked me to take the helm (that's boat speak for drive this thing) while he went below to the head ...I was totally and utterly confused. He had just informed me previously that the head of the boat was called the bow and now he going below to the head. But since he did seem in a bit of a hurry I decided that now was not the time to correct his boat speak. Will I ever be sea worthy?

Now back to the statement I made in the previous paragraph. "The Captain asked me to drive this boat while he went below to the head". I came to the conclusion while I was driving the boat and he went to the head that my Captain is a weakling!! Tacking is not hard work at all...I was zigzagging the whole time he was below and it wasn't hard at all. That zigzag maneuver was no problem for me!! Keep in mind the sails were down.

The little boat we drag behind us is called a dinghy and the rope that hauls the little boat is called a painter. Since they insist on renaming everything I don't think it's entirely my fault that we lost the cute little boat. We never used it anyway so I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. When he said check the painter and be sure it isn't tangled I got so totally confused with all the boat speak. Trim the sheets...check the painter...check the head sail...the head of the boat is the bow. Anybody would get confused with all those commands. Is it any wonder I cut the painter and peed in the bow of the boat!!