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Drive Thru
A seven-story high wave damaged a cruise ship returning from the Bahamas weekend in 2005, smashing windows, flooding more than 60 cabins and injuring four passengers. The Norwegian Dawn was diverted from its route when the ship ran into rough weather on the way back to New York. "The ship was hit by a freak wave that caused two windows to break in two different cabins," Norwegian Cruise Line said in a statement. It said 62 cabins flooded and four passengers had cuts and bruises. The wave reached as high as deck 10 on the ship.The cruise line said passengers whose cabins were flooded were being flown home from Charleston and the safety of the ship "was in no way compromised by this incident." Now isn't that a great way to spend a vacation? All is going well then all of the sudden a 7 story high wave just slams into the side of the ship unexpectedly! Freak waves, unexpected storms, the turbulent waters of life can do a lot of damage if we are not prepared as much as we should be. Chapter 27 of Acts describes with tremendous detail one of the dangers that the apostle Paul encountered during his ministry. This account illustrates some key survival strategies for life’s storms. Scripture identifies several causes for storms. Some are caused by human error while others blow into our lives by divine design to shape our character to be more like Christ. Regardless of how a storm starts, how to survive is the burning question of those in the storm. We can survive the “storm punches” of life, and it helps to have an anchor to stabilize the ship. An interesting sidebar of chapter 27 is the information about nautical techniques used during the first century. One of the survival tactics was to drop anchor not to secure a position but to stabilize the ship. Using the letters of the word ANCHOR as an outline, we can apply these survival strategies to our lives. That is what we will be doing over the next few days...so drop anchor and lets learn together... © Copyright 2009 by CCC Ministries |