Wayne Weekly “Garage Sailing…Truth Finding”

Garage Sailing…Finding Truth

My wife Evie and I went ‘garage sailing” recently. I put on my life jacket, and we cast off for destinations known and unknown.

Evie enjoys these sporadic Saturday morning cruises. We set sail and soon moor at various docks, generally around Auburn. Evie grabs her gear (her purse) and looks to discover lost treasures. I sometimes wait for her behind the wheel and fiddle with cleaning my dashboard, or watching the garage “sailors”, having navigated by GPS devises, or maps, or memory, walk their gangplanks and anxiously search for precious discarded cargo.

On occasion, I’ll decide to join my wife traveling into a maze of tables, make shift clothes racks, worn out boxes, and a variety of plastic crates. Such was the case that Saturday morning.

I usually look for tools or gadgets (I really don’t need any more), sometimes a piece of clothing  (like a broken-in hoodie), and books. I don’t buy many of these books, but once in a blue moon, one or two catch my interest. Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous was my find that morning.

Captains Courageous is a classic novel. Written in 1897 by Kipling tells the story of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, Jr., the only child of a railroad tycoon and doted upon by his mother. This spoiled, snooty young man is accidently thrown off a steamer into the sea and rescued from certain death by a Portuguese fisherman in the north Atlantic.

The adventure of being taken onto a fishing schooner, out for the fishing season with no way home, proved to be a time of rough sea’s trials produced by both men and waves, enduring discipline, and maturing into a responsible and productive man.

The story reminded me of the passage in Hebrews that tells us that God deals with us as sons, disciplining us for our good so that we might share in His holiness. The passage tells us that discipline, at the moment, is not joyful but sorrowful, but its end result brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Like young Harvey, God exposes us to sometimes the hardest of discipline so as to mature us and temper us. His discipline forces us to grow and become “fit for the Master’s use” (2^nd Timothy 2:21).

As believers, we’re not to despise the discipline of the Lord, but welcome it, knowing its beneficial results.

“MY SON, DO NOT REGARD LIGHTLY THE DISCIPLINE OF THE LORD,

NOR FAINT WHEN YOU ARE PUNISHED BY HIM;

FOR WHOM THE LORD LOVES HE DISCIPLINES,

AND HE PUNISHES EVERY SON WHOM HE ACCEPTS.” 

 It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?  But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.  Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?  For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness.  For the moment, all discipline seems not to be pleasant, but painful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Hebrews 12:5-11