Logos Hope Trip - #3 - At Anchor, and a Change of Plans

I wish I had written more down at the end of each day we were on the ship, since the week is already starting to get blurry as I try to remember the details of what actually happened. Of course, the fact that we were stuck out at anchor and couldn't participate in many of our planned activities didn't help. The first couple of days (Fri-Sun) went according to plan, but the announcement early on Monday morning (about 6:00AM) that we were leaving our berth due to the continued swell, pretty much threw the rest of our agenda to the wind.

(Apparently, the problem was a storm on the other side of the island. We had bright, clear weather with a moderate wind, but the waves were carrying around and coming into the harbor where we were tied up, causing the ship to rock back and forth enough that the captain was concerned with potential damage to the ship and moorings. We were also concerned with being bumped out of our berth by a grain ship which was due to come in to offload flour, a process that would take several days. If we had been forced to leave that berth, we would have lost the advantage of being open up to the public for access to the book fair. If we had moved to one of the cruise line berths, then the crew could come and go, but the general public wasn't allowed.)

I now have a pretty good idea of what seasickness feels like. Thankfully, I didn't get really nauseous, as some people do, but I had a nagging headache for most of the first day at anchor, and for the next couple of days, found myself constantly tired. Later in the week, the waves started to calm down a bit, and I started to get used to the constant rolling, but overall, seasickness wasn't one of my more pleasant experiences. According to our original schedule, Monday was supposed to be an "off day," so we had planned to go ashore and look around the island a little. Unfortunately, that trip got immediately axed. However, I managed to take a nap on during the day, which helped with the seasickness. My bunk was perpendicular to the axis of the ship, which meant that I was rocking head-to-foot rather than rolling back and forth. At least I wasn't feeling like I was going to roll out of bed. Eventually, my system sort of got used to the rolling, and though I still felt tired a lot, I was still able to work, and after a while, even enjoy the rest of the week.

Sue and Joyce did a lot of sewing during the week, from curtains to mending. They had planned on doing some sewing anyway, but being at anchor and our onshore activities canceled, they took up sewing in earnest. A couple of people came up to her and almost begged to have some of their work clothes patched. (Those people down in the engine room and serving as deck crew can be pretty hard on even the toughest of clothes!) I had to spend an hour or two on Tuesday trying to fix one of the two old sewing machines, since it wasn't functioning at all. I'm no expert on sewing machines, but with some fiddling, I was able to at least get it sort of working.

Starting Tuesday, Dave and I went to the book exhibit. With all the pressure to just keep the shelves filled during the time visitors are on board, it's hard to actually spend time checking that the books are shelved correctly (not jumbled up by people putting things back in the wrong place), or even that the price markings are accurate. Since the ship visits so many different ports, they don't use any specific currency, but instead, use "units", which then correlate to a list of prices posted around the floor. For example, a book of 200 units translated to something like 5 Barbados dollars. However, sometimes, there would be a change in the unit price of a book. If someone put up a new stack of books but forgot to change the ones already there, you would have a discrepancy. So, Dave and my job for the next two days was to go through the stacks and make sure that the prices of the books were marked and consistent..... all while the ship was rocking, back and forth, back and forth. OK, remember we have to be FAT -- Flexible, Available and Teachable. ;-)

While I (mostly) enjoyed the practical work on the ship (OK, I really liked the engine room), what I really thought was important was the time we had interacting with the young people on board. While at anchor, there was a lot of frustration among the crew that they couldn't get off the ship or open up deck 4 and the I-Café to do what they had come there to do. However, as the ship's director reminded us, God wasn't surprised by our turn of events, and He still had plans. Since we couldn't get on shore, the effect for us was that we had much more time to talk to and work along side of the crew.

We had many meals when we could sit down and share with people. For Sue and me, it was especially rewarding to catch up with some of the young people we had met 8 months earlier at the GO conference in Germany. We'd met so many people there, full of hopes and dreams and visions for the future, and now we had a chance to see how they were actually doing. It was encouraging to see how much each of them had grown in that short time.

Of course, they still had their struggles. One common theme was that of relationships. Several people mentioned having a difficult time because they had developed close friendships with short term people (such as people in the “STEP” program, which only lasts a few months), only to have those friends leave the ship at the end of their term, perhaps never to be seen again. One asked for prayer after developing a friendship with one young lady, and then feeling crushed (“I can't breathe.”) when she left the ship at the end of her time there. Sometimes, with the intensity of life on the ship, it's hard to find someone who will just be a friend to hang out with, to talk and joke, to give you a chance to unwind and decompress. There were issues with balancing between working/ministering and relaxing. Some worried about getting to the end of a day and looking back and feeling like they hadn't used their “free time” wisely, while another asked for prayer for a balance between being involved in an endless blur of activities and being more contemplative, or as she put it, “a balance between being a Martha and a Mary.”

Still, with all the pressure and struggles, I was amazed to see how God was working, and the depth of character that these young people showed. We had the opportunity to attend several prayer meetings on board ship during the week we were there, and when there was time for sharing, they would come up one after the other, sharing Scriptures, and encouraging each other. I never heard them complain about the work, though I did hear some frustration over not being able to get off the ship to talk with people on shore more. For me, that time was perhaps the greatest blessing I could have received from the trip -- to see how, in spite of all their fears and foibles, God was filling the hearts and minds of these young people with a passion to serve Him and to know Him.