The Life Jacket

Letting Go of the Boat

Have you ever had that one endeavor, that one dream, or that one task that just seems so daunting?  I have.  A lot of them!  Ones that seem so far out of reach that they are like mere fantasies rather than things that could actually become reality.   

God has been teaching me that it’s time to let go of the boat.  For me personally, at first I didn’t quite understand what that meant.  But one morning I had to run my one hour for the week in which my goal was to see how many miles I could complete in that hour.  With the July humidity my workouts had not been very good, and actually the most I had done that month was 4 miles, and half of it was walking. 

Well according to the radar it wasn’t supposed to rain for a couple hours, but the sky sure didn’t look too promising.  It wasn’t supposed to be a thunderstorm so I decided to go out (and if you’ve read my past posts, you know I’m fearful of getting caught in another storm).  So I grabbed a rain jacket in case it did rain, that way I could keep going and not worry as much about getting hypothermia.

As I began I kept watching the clouds and decided to put it on while I was running, which was quite difficult in itself, not to mention the netting inside kept getting tangled around my arm, but I had to keep going.  Ug.  Once the coat was on, I began getting miserable and uncomfortably hot.  I eventually took it off and deemed it unnecessary for only an hour any way.  But then about 15 minutes later I did the whole thing over again. 

About half way through I decided to just leave it wrapped around my waist.  On one of my passes by the house God suggested I toss it to the side till I was finished.  I mean, it was very annoying as it kept turning and it was just an added extra weight.  But I decided to keep it anyway.  I felt more comfortable wearing it, having it on hand just in case I needed it.  It was then that God began showing me how that little rain jacket, which really wouldn’t have done much for very long anyway, was like a life jacket to me.  I felt safer so to speak in holding it close to me.  Ever since that day, God has been showing me the different “life jackets” that I have in life.  You know, the back up plans!  Or plan B, C, D, and maybe even on up to Z!

Life has a way of turning upside down in the smidgen of a second.  That’s why we have all these plans right?  That way it saves us from disappointment or having no direction or from getting hurt.  We seem to live in fear as an outcome.  And these fears are really just an added weight to our walk with the Lord, but we seem to gladly hold onto them, as if they would somehow save us from the approaching storms.

The Lords desire is for us to cast all of our cares upon the Lord and to ditch every fear.  He desires for us to walk on the water.  But in order for us to do this, we must let go of the boat.  Peter would have never walked on the water if he had held onto the one thing his flesh deemed necessary for survival in the raging winds.  Most sailors desire and eagerly seek to stay in the boat during a storm, but Peter wanted out.  He wanted to walk to Jesus.  Why?  Because He knew who Jesus was.

What about you? What is your life jacket?  Are you willing to let go of the boat in order to walk to Jesus?  Do you really know who Jesus is?