So What is Your Ship Built For?

This is really part 3 of what is turning out to be a series, so if you haven’t read “Going Down Swinging,” (both parts), you should do that first.

As many of you know, I’m a sailor. I took it up as a teenager, and rediscovered it about ten years ago after a thirty year hiatus while I, you know raised a family, built a business, paid for college tuitions and weddings, yada, yada, yada.

In “Going Down Swinging, Part 1, I concluded with a quote that was positioned over my desk for probably twenty years. It said, “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.” In Part 2, I told you about my dad, who approached life very conservatively, and died before he ever really got the chance to find out what his ship was built for.

All of which begs for the question that I’ve been leading up to. What is your ship built for?

Visit any harbor and you will see a variety of ships. They look very different. And they act very different. Your power boat may go 3-4 times as fast as my sailboat. That fishing boat over there is fitted out for a very specific function. That tugboat is almost 100% engine down below.

So what about YOUR ship? What are YOU built for? It’s one thing for me to convince you to set sail out of the harbor, but your chances of success are slim (and the danger great) if you don’t know where you are going.

So for the next few days, with your permission, I’m going to poke and probe a little, and present you with some exercises that may help you identify what you want to do when you leave the harbor. I’ll bet you have a pretty good idea already. You may have even identified one or two destinations, but we may identify even more. And it’s kind of a fun trip, if you like to dream.

Every one of us has one or more God given passions, and the God given abilities to realize them. When we talk about “getting the best out of the rest of your life,” we MUST identify YOUR passions, motivate you to purse them, and equip you for the journey.

“Journey,” by the way, is the name of my sailboat. Is that a fitting name, or what?

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