What are you going to do with your life?

This question seems at one point to be the most important question and yet the answer can be intangible and nebulous, in fact i think it can be one of the hardest things to know( I do know that when I grow up I want to be a pilot) it feels like it is a metric by which people will define you at a certain age, oh you are going to university well done, you want to be a plumber ??? surely a bright smart person like you should be heading off to university. The reality is that school does little to prepare you for life. I distinctly remember the teachers at my school encouraging me to head off to university because I was a smart kid. the problem with this was that I did not know myself very well at all, it seemed like good advice so I headed off to university enrolling in a science degree, whilst I did very well in socialisation playing 500 eating MacDonald’s and watching movies here and there but I did not have much passion for Science and ended up like a few of my friends not doing as well as I could have which is a nice way of saying that I failed 3 out of my 8 subjects. I went back for round 2 and didn’t do much better in 1994. I finished my second year of University about as well as the first and had nearly 1.5 yrs. of a 3 year degree completed. One of the issues was I didn’t really know what I wanted and what I was trying to achieve at uni was far from what I enjoyed, I had enjoyed learning at school as I had viewed it through the Lense of competing with my fellow classmates but at uni I didn’t really know my classmates so the element of competition was not there and the goals and direction that might have replaced this were unknowable to me at the time.

The story that I will recount is how God directed my path. i Haven’t always listened to him and have been the 1 sheep that ran away however Jesus always comes chasing for me.

As I write this at nearly 50 years of age I look back with benefit of hindsight and see the hand of God at work in my life, you see at 20 I was social but socially scared, if I was asked to speak in public or share something I would have done anything including crying to get out of it(in fact this was a strategy that I am sad to say I may have employed once or twice) God who knows me better than i know myself knew that i needed adventure and experiences to break me away from this fear and so he enacted the first part of his plan.

About this time I was offered the chance to help out some friends of my family (they knew I could sail) and crew on their mission’s boat delivering relief medicines to Bougainville Island which had been involved in a massive civil war at the time. This was a literal answer to an unspoken prayer and I jumped at the chance. A couple of months of hard work as a builders labourer and farmer saw enough money in the bank to cover my food and passport stuff. I packed my gear and headed off to catch a ferry to make the boat I was on. as i was walking down to the ramp i remember hearing a little splash but didn’t think anything of it until i went to get my wallet and ferry ticket out. i had no wallet and no ticket and no money as all of these things had been in my wallet, i realised that the little splash I had heard must have been my wallet falling out of my pocket and landing in the ocean.

Fortunately I had my snorkelling gear and so in freezing mid April NZ weather I stripped off put on my mask and snorkel and went for a swim. Unfortunately for me my wallet was a light grey colour, the ferry had just left disturbing the water and the day was drizzly and over cast, I swam around for about 30 minutes scouring the bottom, I was almost too cold to swim and so I prayed that if God wanted me to go he had better help me find my wallet. I did one last dive and on the last of my breath hold I spotted the slight outline of a rectangle that was my wallet, I quickly retrieved it and dried myself my money and my wallet out in the ferry office waiting for the next boat. I had contacted the boat and they were waiting for me when I landed from Waiheke Island in Auckland City.

The crew on the boat consisted of me, Ed and Mel the owners of the boat Living waters, their 12 yr old daughter Ruth and an older methodist minister who’s grandfather had been a missionary to Bougainville in the early 1900’s, we cleared customs and departed NZ. everyone apart from me promptly got seasick and none apart from me really ate anything for 2-3 days. It is a funny feeling being on a boat in the middle of the ocean, all of your life there has been land and stillness and one mroning you wake up with no land in sight and the realization that you probably couldn’t swim long enough to make it back to shore. Your progress becomes 1 point on a map followed by another at the end of each watch with a n ETA of when you will make landfall, we were originally going to head to Norfolk island and then head to Vanuatu but we got caught up in a category 2 cyclone that put us off course for Norfolk.

The cyclone was pretty exciting with 140 km and hour winds and 60-80 foot waves. With no sails up and a sea anchor out the front we were going backwards at about 4-5 knots. To a young indestructible 20 yr old it was exhilarating……. TBC