I’m not actually a fisherman, never cared to fish growing up. But now that I’m older, married, have four boys, and life rages on around me, I fully understand the draw of being on a boat in quietness and stillness. I’m not saying I want to be away from my boys and wife – I’d love for them to be there with me. But I am saying that the quietness and stillness needed to fish properly sounds incredible.
We spend most of our lives serving others: our wives, our children, our community. Even if we aren’t skilled in every discipline we often can find a brother who is. We learn from them and are able to do it ourselves next time and pass that knowledge on. We work hard. We learn a lot.
But there needs to be times when we are in moments of stillness and quietness. We need to have those times when we are out in deep water and we throw the anchor over.
No, I’m not about to tell you about mental health. Get over your problems. Some of you have legit mental issues that need to be dealt with, but most of us, we just need to keep moving. What I’m talking about here is about where we anchor our core, our soul. And if it is anything but Jesus, we aren’t doing it right. We need the time in solitude, in stillness, in quietness to anchor our souls to Christ.
Oh no! He went all spiritual on us!
I did, and so will this blog. Harbor Forge is about drawing us closer to Jesus (becoming more like who He actually is not who the world portrays him to be) and subsequently drawing us closer to our wives, our children, our brothers, our neighbors.
Where do you anchor?
Or maybe you’d rather me say it this way: we all have a throne, so what sits upon yours? (We all worship something – ourselves, our jobs, sex, drinking, cars, money – and that is what sits on the throne.)
Every one of those other examples, as well as everything other than Jesus, will wash away. They will burn up in the fire. There is but one place we can anchor deep and know that we are safe. And that is in Christ Jesus. On His Word (a.k.a. the Bible). On His promises.
If we do not anchor deep in the Word of God, being still before God, quieting our hearts and minds to listen to Him, we will stay in a state of unsettledness. There will always be a longing in our lives. We will always be searching. And yet, this is where we find ourselves, well where I find myself at least, way too often.
So how do we change this? How do we anchor in the right place? Simple in word, difficult in action. Because we are more susceptible to entropy than growth, we must daily work at this.
Accepting Jesus is our first step. If you haven’t, do that. If you have, the next step is reading His Word, the Bible. Daily. Don’t’ beat yourself up if you miss a day. But that is what we are shooting for: perfect attendance. Seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Simple.
May you find yourself anchoring deep in Jesus and His perfect love. When we are, we are closer to being the men we are created to be.
Want to talk about this post? Have a question? Get in touch. I have disabled comments and will always as far as I’m concerned. You can chat with me by finding Harbor Forge on social media or through email. I don’t want to deal with spam or people leaving stupid comments, not on the blog at least.