Would It Be Fun to Be on a Cruise Ship Alone?

PEOPLE REALLY ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THINGS Imagine being on a cruise ship alone. Everything on the ship is available to you, and all resources get magically resupplied when you use them. You can do anything you want, whenever you want, for as long as you want. After you had hit all the golf balls into the ocean that you wanted, after you had shot all the skeet you wanted, after you had slid down the waterslide until you were exhausted, after you had watched every movie in the theater, after you had eaten from the mile-long buffet until you couldn’t eat another bite – then what would you do? With no one else on the cruise ship, it would end up a form of high-tech solitary confinement. Before long, you would be willing to trade everything on the ship for one close friend.

People are more important than things.

People Are What Make Life Worth Living Harold Kushner, in his book When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, wrote, I was sitting on the beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work, building an elaborate Sandcastle by the water’s edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me an important lesson. Everything in our lives, and the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure. Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh. (p. 166) God has created us to live in harmony and unity with other humans, and unless we have meaningful relationships, life becomes very hard. Billy Graham often said that the number one most popular sermon he preached was on loneliness. In our “look-out-for-number-one” society, we have gotten what we looked out for: ourselves. And we find that we are not enough to satisfy ourselves. We need others or we feel alienated, isolated, lonely. As Benjamin Disraeli said, “we are created for love. It is the principle of existence and its only end.” He was right. Look at what the Bible says:

• God is love. (1 John 4:8)
• We are created in God’s image. (Genesis 1:28)
• Therefore, our greatest longing is to love and be loved. That is why God made “love” the highest commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God… you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 25:37 – 39)

  We Often Sacrifice Relationships For the Sake of Lesser Things In spite of this obvious and transparent reality, we often sacrifice relationships for the sake of lesser things. Again Kushner wrote: I have found myself traveling and lecturing a great deal. Often, I am invited to the home of some prominent member of the community for dinner before my lecture, or for a reception afterward. Most of the time, my hosts are very gracious and the gatherings enjoyable. But every now and then I find myself uncomfortable in that setting, and one evening I finally realized why. Some people have to be very competitive to reach the top, and once they have gotten there, they find it hard to break the habit of competitiveness. They are not able to relax and chat with me. They feel that they have to impress me by telling me how successful they are, by dropping the names of important people they know. Sometimes they start an intellectual argument with me, trying to show me that they know more about my subject than I do. On those occasions, I find myself wondering why they feel they have to be so competitive, why they have to respond to a guest in their home as a competitor to be challenged, and whether part of the price they have paid for their success, part of their bargain with the devil, if you will, is that they keep transforming friends into enemies.(When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, p. 59) The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Cultivate Relationships There are lots of books on friendship that give practical tips and hints on building relationships and friendships. I have found good books on friendship very helpful. However, if I were to highlight the single most valuable thing I have ever done to guide me in the cultivation of friendships, it is getting familiar with the central passages of Scripture on friendship and memorizing them so well that you can say them as fast as an auctioneer. Then, review/recite/repeat the memorized passages daily for at least a month; longer, if necessary. The key is to repeat them until they change you. I review them, on average, once a day and have done so for nearly 10 years. It has been life-changing! The Bible has quite a few verses that actually have the word “friend” in them, and they are very good. However, the two best for me are verses that don’t have the word friend in them. They are powerful, nevertheless. The single-most powerful verse in all the Bible for relationships: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Luke 6:31 The single-most complete passage in all the Bible for relationships: Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a The Corinthian passage is long, I admit, if you are new to Scripture memorization. But just look through the words in the passage! Image how your relationships can be transformed when each of those descriptors becomes increasingly true of you! Choose a different translation, if you prefer. Just read the verses once or twice a day (when you get up and when you go to bed) until you have them memorized. It may take a month or more, but it is an essentially painless way to memorize, as you are patient with the process. Don’t go through life like you were alone on a cruise ship.

Life is only as rich as your relationships.

People are more important than things. Invest in others as the key to enriching your life.

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