WHO’S IN CHARGE?
Back in the eighties, I went on a holiday to Norway via a roll-on-roll-roll off car ferry from Newcastle to Bergan. Everybody was on board, the bow doors were closed, the engines started, and then, nothing!
I looked up at the bridge of the ship and there was a guy with a captains’ hat at the wheel, but he wasn’t, from what I could see, doing anything but standing there waiting. “Curious”, I thought, “Why isn’t he setting off?”, I said to one of my friends. A crew person overheard me and said, “He can’t move out until the harbour pilot arrives”.
A few minutes later, a little tugboat pulled alongside us, and another guy with a captains’ hat climbed up a ladder on the side of the ship and made his way to the bridge. I watched him go into the bridge and the ship’s captain saluted him and stood aside, whilst the new guy, the ‘harbour pilot’, took charge. The ship then started moving and he piloted it out of the harbour. Once we got out of the harbour and into the open sea, the process was reversed and the harbour pilot then made his way to the ladder and the guy got off the boat, back into the tugboat, and the tug went back to the harbour front and dropped him off on land.
The reason the harbour pilot took the ship out was because he knew what the ships’ captain couldn’t see. He knew every sandbank and every safe passage in the harbour, he knew where it was safe to go and where it was treacherous to even attempt it. The ship’s captain knew that, and was grateful to allow the harbour pilot do what he knew he could not do himself.
In ‘The Message’ translation of the bible, in Proverbs chapter 3, verses 5 and 7b it says,
“Trust God from the bottom of your heart: don’t try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he’s the one who will keep you on track. Don’t assume you know it all.”
When you follow Jesus it’s not all down to you.
God only asks us to do what WE can do, and then ‘trust him to do what only HE can do in us, and through us. In the Message version of the Bible, at the end of Matthews’ Gospel Jesus says “I’ll be with you as you do, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age”
You are not alone in this life.
Life is precious but precarious, handle with prayer!
by Fred Wright 1st Feb 2022
