Bon Voyage 3
On a Good Ship
It is uncertain when the ship started straying off it's carefully chartered course and into treacherous waters. The Captain's log suggested that he might have drank himself into a drunken state and passed out. When he awoke, the ship had wandered extremely off course and had become lodged between some very large rock formations and was stuck there. When the Captain became coherent again, it was too late. The ship was stranded in unfamiliar waters and there was no other sign of life in view. The communication equipment did not work.
Over time, the water dried up completely around the ship. Leaving it deserted, cut off from any other form of civilization and doomed to parish, surrounded by a desert of mud. For many miles in all directions, there was nothing visible, but dried cracked mud from what used to be the bottom of the sea.
As the Captain accepted his fate that he would die with the ship, he opened his last bottle of vintage scotch. With each swallow, he reminisced of good times past and the might-have-beens of yesterday. Tears ran in a steady stream down both sides of his face. He cried hard. His soul was broken. He had failed.
Ironically, it was the Captain's own tears that saved his life. He cried for so long that the salty tears from his eyes saturated the earth around him and, eventually, replenished the sea. The water from his tears caused the ship to rise up and, once again, it was free to move in all directions. It was not time for him or the ship to perish. Something divine had intervened.
The ship has now found it's way back to the civilized world. It sails proudly among the other ships. It has shed the forbidden cargo that it once carried and has become a mentor and light to the other ships, offering them hope in the darkness. The ship knows the sea well. The dark stormy nights of the past are only remembered in the Captain's journal. Along with all the might-have-beens, that it sails by occasionally on his journey through the great open sea.
Even in the darkest night and during the most treacherous conditions of the sea, the ship remembered the lessons of his youth and what he was built to become. He held on to hope when the forces of nature were against him. He realized the world is not perfect and there will be challenges ahead, but he boldly sails forward. In many ways, his journey has just begun.
Bon Voyage!
I have written these stories of The Good Ship as metaphors of my own heart and the encounters and struggles I have faced along my own journey through this world. I hope these words will be a source of hope and comfort to those who read them. I believe that love is the light that we must follow. It is the true light. Anything else will carry us away from happiness and will eventually burnout.
Into the light is a weekly column dedicated to rational discussion of legislative pursuit, moral proposition and the general quest for equality of the LGBT Community.
Written by Jim Lawson