Lost at Sea

Do you pray when life is smooth sailing, or wait until a storm hits?

If you want to feel small and powerless, take a fishing boat into the ocean, miles away from land. There is nothing but sky and water as far as the eye can see. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

The ocean appears enormous, deep and mysterious from your tiny boat. You can grasp that we live on a watery planet with three-fourths of the Earth’s surface covered by water. When a storm rolls in, you face powerful winds, massive waves and driving rain.

Back in the early 1960s, Adm. Hyman Rickover gave President John F. Kennedy a small brass plaque, engraved with a prayer. Kennedy liked it, and he used it at the dedication of a memorial to people missing at sea. The prayer says, “O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

True for us all.

 

A Plea for Rescue

A young man named Alec Frydman recently went fishing for albacore off the coast of Washington State. This was his first attempt to be a ...