• Originally published July 18, 2008 at 5:33 p.m., updated July 18, 2008 at 5:33 p.m.

“Days should speak and multitude of years should teach wisdom. But there is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”

Job 32:7

Today I was celebrating my birthday and like the old song said “I could do what I want to, so I fished in the deep channel of the inter-coastal canal. I like fishing the channel because there are big colored channel markers that tell you where you are, where you’ve been and where you are going.

In dedication of my birthday, I thought it was appropriate to fish at marker number 72. It seems just like yesterday that I was fishing at marker 71 and I realized how quickly a year could pass. I wondered why the markers seemed to be passing more quickly the older you get compared to when you were young and you thought the next marker would never get here.

I laughed with myself when I thought back to how long it seemed to take to leave marker number 12 and wondered if I would ever get to marker 13. I also remembered without a laugh how rough the waters of my life got as I passed through those teenage marker years. I never knew that those little swells and waves were just getting me ready for the rough seas that lay ahead.

The seas between markers 20 and 60 were filled with trials, tests and triumphs. I can look out of the back of the boat at those waters and say, “Whew, thank God I made it.”

From marker 72 I can look back over the waters of where I once was and they are just going on “ebbing and tiding” like I never even had been there. I wonder if they even remember the time I caught a shark there at marker 65 and it flipped off into the boat and I ran the 100 yard dash in that 16 foot boat while that shark bit at everything it could get its teeth on. Maybe this was just warning me how my retirement years would go.

All I have really learned to do in my journey down the channel of life is to keep the bow pointed forward, the throttle on full and to remember that boats don’t have brakes. I know this is not scriptural but maybe it should have been.

Dear Lord, isn’t it strange that as we pass the many markers in the channel we have chosen for our lives, the things we feared are remembered as funny and our biggest failures turn us into the strong people we are today as our older eyes are already scanning the horizon for that next marker. Keep going with us, God.

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