{"id":1599,"date":"2018-11-28T08:17:46","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T13:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/?p=1599"},"modified":"2018-11-28T08:27:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T13:27:50","slug":"sailors-and-the-handiwork-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/sailors-and-the-handiwork-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Sailors and the Handiwork of God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, someone gave me a free copy of an old book on submarines.\u00a0 The author was a leading United States Navy man in the War in the Atlantic starting in 1942 when the German submarines were at the height of their successes against British and American shipping.\u00a0 I found\u00a0 a tremendous little section that I was not expecting about the reason that most sailors believe in God.\u00a0 I thought it was worth sharing here.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Sailors are supposed to be notoriously superstitious and to believe in all sort of omens religiously. When you get down to brass tacks, these so-called superstitions are fundamentally religious in nature.\u00a0 They are an admission that man doesn\u2019t run this Universe to suit himself and that his plans are subject to veto by a Higher Power.\u00a0 Sailors instinctively understand this and believe in God because they have a better chance than men who stay ashore to observe and think about the handiwork of God.<\/p>\n

They see the daily miracles of sunrise and sunset and understand the Power that regulates them better than the scientists do.\u00a0 The scientists can \u201cexplain\u201d the whole thing in terms of Newton\u2019s Laws and show you that there is no miracle to it at all, the sun can\u2019t help rising and setting.\u00a0 But sailors who know nothing about Newton\u2019s Laws are wiser than the scholars who expound laws which sailors can\u2019t understand.\u00a0 They go beyond the mathematics of the sunrise and see in it the hand of the One Who created these laws of mathematics as well as everything else.<\/p>\n

They rub elbows with God\u2019s power and majesty in the storms at sea, and when the ocean worships God by raising great sweeping mountains of water that dwarf in power and majesty anything we see ashore, they get drenched to the skin in worship.<\/p>\n

During the night watches when the sky is clear, sailors gaze out into the depths of the starry universe in which we live.\u00a0 Each night they see how perfectly all parts of creation fit together.\u00a0 They see how harmoniously the whole magnificent machine operates everywhere except on this puny planet where man can interfere.<\/p>\n

Men who live close to these wonders every day on a tiny ship, absorb and learn some things that smarter men may miss in the strife and turmoil of life ashore.\u00a0 They know instinctively that we and this universe were created by a Supreme Being, more powerful than the effect which He created, and not simply by the haphazard operation of the laws of probability.<\/p>\n

Sailors often speak of \u201cgood luck,\u201d but when they do they do not mean gambler\u2019s luck controlled by the laws of probability.\u00a0 When a sailor speaks of good luck, he means God\u2019s blessing, and there is certainly no better luck you can enjoy than that.”<\/p>\n

From Daniel V. Gallery, Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea: The Daring Capture of the U-505<\/em> (H. Regnery Co., 1956), 128-29.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, someone gave me a free copy of an old book on submarines.\u00a0 The author was a leading United States Navy man in the War in the Atlantic starting in 1942 when the German submarines were at the height of their successes against British and American shipping.\u00a0 I found\u00a0 a tremendous little section that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1599"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603,"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599\/revisions\/1603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}