SMALL BOATS AND BIG WAVES

SMALL BOATS AND BIG WAVES
Wednesday, December 23, 2020 by DONNA SCHLACTER

Categories: devotional

PLEASE WELCOME

DONNA SCHLACHTER

DEVOTIONAL WEDNESDAY

Small boats—and the thought of drowning, terrify me. This fear paralyzed me and caused me to miss out on numerous things—until God helped me see the bigger picture.

As a result, I don’t do small boats.

I won’t enter anything smaller than a cruise ship.

And this from a girl who grew up on an island in the Atlantic.

Fast forward about fifty years, and I’m in Peru on a mission trip with my church. In fact, I’m in the jungle. I already knew I’d have to take a boat from the port to the camp, but that’s okay. I focused on “port” and “camp”, not “boat”.

We arrive at a collection of tiny structures in the middle of nowhere, providing food and supplies for weary travelers. We slip, slide, and scramble down a muddy bank to the water’s edge where our sailing craft awaits. I look upstream. Nothing but a couple of canoes. I look downstream. A metal boat about ten feet long, its canvas covering long rotted—a tiny outboard putt-putting to life under the tentative ministrations of a teenage boy.

Hubby helps me clamber in, and I sit in the middle of the middle seat, clinging to the edges of the warped board. The rest of the team is chatting, laughing, leaning against the side, ignoring me, for which I’m thankful. I think.

But the Lord showed me the riverbanks,

which in some places looked like sculpted sand.

He reminded me that the river didn’t carve these banks

because although we’re at the headwaters of the Amazon

the water is slow-moving.

Photo by Nathalia Segato on Unsplash

God pointed out the wake of the boat nudging up against the riverbank and told me that the hundreds of boats that ply these waters daily made the contours in the riverbank.

“You are like the waves,” He said. “A little touch here. A nudge there. Your presence changes the lives of people, just like the wake changes the shoreline.”

I find this is true in all areas of my life. I don’t have to be in our church building to be surrounded by God’s presence and His people. Times are different, but His truth remains.

ABOUT DONNA SCHLACHTER

Donna writes historical suspense under her own name, and contemporary suspense under her alter ego of Leeann Betts and has been published more than 30 times in novellas, full-length novels, and non-fiction books. She is a member of ACFW, Writers on the Rock, SinC, Pikes Peak Writers, and CAN; facilitates a critique group; teaches writing classes; ghostwrites; edits; and judges in writing contests.

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