Well, we are nearing the end of the Book of Acts. Paul is on his way to Rome, and on the way he gets shipwrecked on Malta. It's all in Chapter 27, possibly the finest chapter in the whole book, and I am not alone in thinking this. Whoever wrote this chapter knew all about storms and ships and seas, had experienced them first-hand. I don't think there is a Great Lakes mariner who could quibble with Luke's description of the storm and the wreck. And when Luke says the storm lasted 14 days, well, I am not aware of any storms that last that long, but it probably felt like an eternity to the men being tossed around in that Roman ship, and like the Great Lakes, there is no room to run when the Mediterranean turns nasty.
"Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" The crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald weren't that lucky. They didn't have Paul aboard receiving a revelation that the ship would be lost but the crew saved. No, Pastor didn't talk about the Edmund Fitzgerald, but he did trot out the old tired statements that all things work for good, that God has a plan, that when bad things happen, it's because he knows we need it to be stronger, and all that. God never gives anyone more than they can handle.
Oh really? That is so blatantly untrue I don't even have words to express how I feel about that. All you have to do is turn on the news and see how senseless this life can be.
One of my uncles was in a German POW camp during World War II. He didn't talk about it, not many who were there did. It's only been fairly recently that I've been able to learn what it really was like for men like him. I do know that the one TV show that we kids were forbidden to watch was "Hogan's Heroes". My mother sat us all down and said simply that Uncle B. was in one of those camps and it wasn't funny at all and that he still had nightmares about it. To this day I've never seen an episode. I've learned that my mother was not alone; that there were other households where that show was not allowed to be on. Households that had men scarred by their experience, households of silence. It was talked about in hushed words that Uncle B. "beat his first wife" and this was somehow connected with what had happened to him in Germany. Now, I never saw that side of Uncle B. To me, he was always a jolly uncle. Whatever had happened in his first marriage, he didn't seem to be that way in his second. He was just a kid when they sent him off to war and he came back broken, forced to live a charade that "it's all good."
I just learned that my friend who is battling cancer found out that the cancer is still active inside of her despite all of the excruciating treatments, despite all her high hopes. She is walking around with something that she doesn't want to admit and that no one is to say directly to her: this time it's terminal. We all have to put up the charade. We are all on a shipwrecked world, dancing as the ship goes down.
"Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" The crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald weren't that lucky. They didn't have Paul aboard receiving a revelation that the ship would be lost but the crew saved. No, Pastor didn't talk about the Edmund Fitzgerald, but he did trot out the old tired statements that all things work for good, that God has a plan, that when bad things happen, it's because he knows we need it to be stronger, and all that. God never gives anyone more than they can handle.
Oh really? That is so blatantly untrue I don't even have words to express how I feel about that. All you have to do is turn on the news and see how senseless this life can be.
One of my uncles was in a German POW camp during World War II. He didn't talk about it, not many who were there did. It's only been fairly recently that I've been able to learn what it really was like for men like him. I do know that the one TV show that we kids were forbidden to watch was "Hogan's Heroes". My mother sat us all down and said simply that Uncle B. was in one of those camps and it wasn't funny at all and that he still had nightmares about it. To this day I've never seen an episode. I've learned that my mother was not alone; that there were other households where that show was not allowed to be on. Households that had men scarred by their experience, households of silence. It was talked about in hushed words that Uncle B. "beat his first wife" and this was somehow connected with what had happened to him in Germany. Now, I never saw that side of Uncle B. To me, he was always a jolly uncle. Whatever had happened in his first marriage, he didn't seem to be that way in his second. He was just a kid when they sent him off to war and he came back broken, forced to live a charade that "it's all good."
I just learned that my friend who is battling cancer found out that the cancer is still active inside of her despite all of the excruciating treatments, despite all her high hopes. She is walking around with something that she doesn't want to admit and that no one is to say directly to her: this time it's terminal. We all have to put up the charade. We are all on a shipwrecked world, dancing as the ship goes down.
