High Seas of the Soul

All my life, my relationship with God has been shaded by the things around me. Until recently. I could go very long stretches of my childhood basically forgetting prayer. But one of the few things my parents taught me was how to pray. I'll never forget. Please, Dear God, what's the intro to all prayers? And that came from my mother. She taught me that, and I used that when I really wanted something, you know, when my mind was simply too small to understand giving the thanks to God for all that I have. When I think back to myself and my relationship with God as a young man, I realized one thing that I ask way too much of my own children to understand the greater picture, particularly my young when they are young. You know what I mean. I think back to myself at nine years old and. Just how simple things were, and I think how simple those things are supposed to be. And I wasn't managing the life that they are managing, you know. In fact, I didn't even have my own computer when I was a teenager, which was both a blessing and a curse. But as time went on, I. Came to real life that God moves through us in everything. You have children who notice that as they grow up, you can see why human beings are different. You can see in your own children. That the words in the Bible, no matter if you believe them or not, about the superiority of mankind and his dominion over the rest of the creatures in the world, is not for nothing. It's not for nothing. Maybe three four years ago, I. Remember sitting on the couch my son coming downstairs one morning, could have been a week day, could have been a weekend, who knows, and laying there and telling me about his dream, which he does or used to do a lot more it does from time to time, but this was a This was a morning tradition in summer time and break time from school my youngest he would come down the stairs and come into the room where I was working and sit on my lap and tell me about his dream. Almost that every day, almost every single day that he was home and I didn't have to wake him for school. But this time particularly, he's laying on the couch telling me about it. And I seen the spark, you know what I mean. I saw the soul in. Him, and it was very easy to see the divinity that this is not just meat and brains and bones, that there's something else coursing through this body. And it's beautiful and it is more, and there is more in there than there are in other things. And I've given a lot of thought to the soul since then, because a lot of people even deny its existence, which is interesting to me. But the things that people deny are always interesting to me, especially the things that are clear. But I do believe that. In each and every one of us exists a ship, a big one, a big, giant ship that courses through the supernatural world. And that giant ship is our soul. And when you stop to consider the things that make a person, that move a person, that create a person, and you know, really turn them into what they are, it is the soul. It is the ship. The course you were on was given to you at birth. Undoubtedly, undoubtedly you're born with the course given by God. And then added to that our life experiences and added to that our desires. Maybe that's the cargo of the soul. And the cargo of the soul determines a little bit about the trajectory. Now, if the cargo is so burdensome that it weighs the ship down, then it can affect the trajectory a lot. We give in too much to what has been done to us, and we give in too much to want. We want what we want done to us, then our desires. In other words, then the ship will go off course. We all know people who have gone off course. We all have gone off course. We know what that's like. We know the feeling when days go by, day after day and things are not right. Things are not happening the right way. You are not acting the right way, the people around you are not right. You were off course the course that God is giving the navigation on that ship that is your soul. Something wrong. It needs to be docked. It needs to be docked. And I think that is a little bit of what Sunday is about. And you know we don't obey. I'm not obeying right now. On the road the day of rest, the day of rest, and the day of quiet, in the day of repentance, and those things do they help you course correct? You leave thee and what you always find. And this is why I believe that the soul navigates is the navigation tool for God right, it is the ship with God's mission on it. And one of the. Reasons I believe that or I like the analogy, is because it's hard to steer a ship, right. It's not easy to change course on a big ship. And that feels like the soul, because it feels like there are parts of you, even though you can mute them, even though you can scar them and burn them and try to cut them away, there are parts. Of you, good and bad, that always seem to be just under the surface. You can go away from these habits and behaviors and likes and dislikes, and you can dissolve them away as best you can, even when they're not a bad thing, even when they're a joyful thing. But you know you don't have time, you know you don't have money, or you know this is not the time in your life to be doing that thing. And you can go into that world again, and the moment you step into it, you feel the flame of it. You feel it right, you know, oh, oh, it's right there at the surface, just waiting to pop. We had been raising two young boys and working hard, you know what I mean, working hard and struggling and dealing with things that were just you know, it's one thing to have young kids. It's another thing entirely to have young kids and to be losing parents at the same time, you know what I mean, and horrible ways, I mean, just the worst ways that you can lose parents. That has been the story of my parents and my in laws, you know what I mean. And when we were raising very young children, we were going through. This, and it was clear. That in order to get through this, we had to deaden things in ourselves. We had to. We couldn't otherwise get through it, you know what I mean. We can't. You can't traverse your path in life in constant lamentations and tears over the fact that you've reached a dark time in life, right, So you take those emotions and you cauterize. And we were in a pretty damn cauterized state at this time. And I remember going into a Halloween store and we were walking into the Halloween store and you know, it's holiday. Fun is part of the Walton way. I mean, if it's a holiday, we're doing it and we're doing it big. But at the same time, you know you've been run over by life. So it's it is what it is. And in this Halloween Halloween store. They had a tunnel for you to walk through at the middle of the store, and there was a little steam, a little sh at the end that no one expected, and I remember the steam hitting. I didn't go into tunnel. I was playing with the animatronics with my younger son and my older son and my wife went through the tunnel, and my wife came out the other side of that tunnel, heart beating, terrified and alive, and I could see a liveliness in her eyes that I hadn't seen in a while, because she was rocked back on course, you know what I mean? Was she in order to sort of mute the emotions and the horrors of what we were living through, you got. To turn everything down, you know what I mean. It's not like you can just say, like, all right, turned the sadness down and turn the happiness way up. Right, you wind up and this is this is getting away from that jet stream that the soul, the ship's soul is on. And but I saw the course correction in her face, and I said, oh, oh, we're a lot lower than I thought. And for good reason, I'm not saying that there shouldn't you know, she should have been in a better headspace. We were all in this headspace of you know, dead tired young kids and nobody's sleeping. Kids are starting school, starting this, starting that, starting sports starting, you. Know what I mean. And then on top of all of that, we had you know, tremendous illness and death. And but I could see the soul that the soul lit up the engine of the mask. The sales went out in my wife that she was, you know, plotting her course back to where God had intended it, because we all wind up off course. If you're looking for if you're looking for someone in your life to love, if you're looking for that special person to marry, and you're looking at all these metrics that the Internet tells you about, you know what I mean, The only metric is that it is that soul. And you can see another person's soul. It's their motive. It's their motive, it's their motivation. It's how they act right, It's it's how they act in good times and in bed. It's a fundamental integrity that they have or don't have. It's the things that they will not compromise on, even when the compromising would make it such an easier day life would either, it'd be beaten and starved. Yet the course, the overall course of that soul can't change, It can't change. This is why love and kindness was found even in the pits of concentration camps. Children were born hidden in these places. So you do best to get to know a person's soul much better than the size of their waist or how tall they might or might not be right, because when you marry, you marry way more than one person. And that's the truth. When you marry, you marry a woman who is in her twenties or a man, and then that person hits their thirties, and that person in their thirties can lose a job, they can lose a parent, they can lose a sibling, they can fall into depression, they can fall into alcoholism. That person in their forties, in their late forties, if they're a woman, can begin, you know, pre menopausal changes in their life. Their looks begin to. Fade, and you know, maybe a man's health begins to fade. And these things happen in the decades to come in their life. And you are marrying, you are cleaving. You am not cleaving, You are clinging. You are chaining yourself to a person who will change inevitably. Their looks will change, right, the things that they enjoy will change, their hobbies will change. The things that you on the surface that you may love about that will change dramatically. But their soul and their course will never change. That soul in them and that court it can be bulldozed over, but it will almost never change. It will almost never change. And if you find someone who is on the course that resonates with yours and that's who you go all in for, you go all in for that person. And it's that simple. So consider consider the following the very course of the. Ship of your soul pbm fam, the life experiences therein and how they've shaped you. And know that even if you are in a dark in the darkest time, and maybe it's just time to dock, right, maybe it's simply time to dock. For repairs, to refuel. To consider the cargo on that ship that is your soul, that creation of gods that was with you when you were born, that motivation, that that what you are here for. And to to get back on course, or. If you were on course, to pray to God and to thank him for the fact that look at this here I am. Locked in course and to thank God for the opportunity to be alive in this time. Enjoy your Sunday, folks. It's gonna be a big week here at PBN