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Pirates of the Superior - Week Two Message Notes

By jgiroux ⋅ December 4, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Pirates of the Superior
Overboard - Adapted from Willow Creek Curriculum “Shipwrecked”
James Giroux

Has anyone here every done anything extremely dangerous or crazy?�  Have you ever been in the middle of doing something and said to yourself, “this is probably going to end in disaster.”?�  When I was in grade 11 I went to visit a friend of mine from camp.�  He lived about an hour away from my house which was so cool because my parents weren’t going to be there.�  He and I were going to spend like 4 days together.�  Coincidentally, his name was also Jamie which automatically makes him part of a group of highly distinguished and amazingly good looking and muscular individuals.� 

Anyway, it was an awesome experience.�  He basically spent the first day or so showing me all around the little town he lived in.�  We walked from his house, to the downtown area, across a really cool looking bridge, we went to a park, I met his friend Charles, and it was pretty sweet.�  And then Jamie took me to the trusses.� 

For those of you who don’t know what trusses are, they are the beams that hold some types of bridges up.�  In this case, the trusses were supporting the bridge so the train tracks were on the top and the trusses were underneath.�  So anyway, I’m there with Jamie and he starts to take off his clothes.�  It’s the middle of summer so it’s pretty hot outside but still I was like, woah, what are you doing?�  He’s like, “I’m going to jump off the trusses.�  You should come too!”�  I was like, “What?!”�  It was a pretty intense moment.� 

So here’s my question, if your friend tells you to jump off a bridge, do you do it?� 

No, you don’t do it.�  That would be stupid and dangerous.� 

The railroad bridge isn’t used anymore but it costs more money to tear it down then to leave it up so it’s been sitting there for a long time.�  The thing about a bridge though is that usually you build a bridge over something, right?�  Well in this case there was a river that this bridge was over, it was about 25 to 30 feet high.�  Now this wasn’t just any river, it was a river with a dam on it and if you know anything about dams, when you’re forcing a large body of water out of a little hole what happens?�  The pressure builds, and when the pressure builds the water moves faster.�  So here we are, Jamie’s in his gitch and walking out across these trusses over this fast moving river and I have a decision to make, do I stay on firm solid ground or do I follow my friend out?

Here’s the question, if your friend tells you to jump off a bridge, do you do it?

I did it.� 

I followed him out for about 15 metres and then we both stopped.�  He looked at me, I looked at him and he said, “Here goes,” and jumped in.�  That’s when my adrenaline started pumping, I could feel my heart thudding in my chest, boom, boom, BOOM, BOOM!�  I was looking down at the water, clutching a post, holding on for dear life, my breath started to get heavier and heavier, this was decision time.�  This is where the men get separated from the boys, the adventurous from the timid, the CRAZY from the SMART!!�  1! 2!

PAUSE FOR EFFECT

SPLASH!!

You never wait for three, if you wait for three chances are you won’t do it.�  I’ll be honest with you, it was exhilarating.�  It was such a rush.� 

It was stupid.

So what did we do after that, well, we put our clothes back on, went home and were totally stoked.�  Here’s where the story gets even crazier though, instead of just enjoying the trusses in the middle of the day we decided we had to attempt it late at night.�  So at around 11 or 12 at night, Jamie, Charles and I went back to the trusses and got ready to jump in again.�  This time though, we wore our bathing suits, we were thinking ahead.

Has anybody here ever gone swimming late at night, when its dark?�  What’s the one thing that’s so cool about swimming late at night?�  Yeah, you can’t really see the water.�  Well, it was a clear and gorgeous night out, not a cloud in the sky all you could see was thousands of stars and of course a giant moon.�  Imagine looking down from 25 or 30 feet in the air and all you see are stars and the moon.�  The water was reflecting the sky above.�  We were pretty much jumping into the stars, jumping into the sky.� 

Obviously at 15, I wasn’t exactly the smartest person in the world, that would come later.�  What I didn’t think about was just how dangerous what we were doing was?�  Imagine if I fell and landed on some jagged rocks or got swept up by the current and couldn’t swim back to shore?�  Nobody knew where we were, what we were doing wasn’t even legal, it was dangerous and it was dumb.� 

Two weeks ago we started our Pirates of the Superior series by starting to look at the difference between someone who is wise and someone who is foolish, do you think I was wise or foolish in this story?

Totally foolish.�  We said that a foolish person is someone who knows the difference between right and wrong and chooses to do the wrong thing anyway and that a wise person was someone who chose to do what was right.

Well, right now we’re going to put your wisdom to the test, this week we are looking at what wise choices look like so we have a little something to test you guys out.

CALL CATHY UP AND PLAY THE TREASURE BAG GAME

[DYLAN’S COUCH – EPISODE ONE – THE NOTE]

Dylan is so awesome, how many people think Dylan was pretty smart with the whole choice he made?�  Pretty creative huh?� 

So where do we come up with what is a good choice and what is a bad choice?�  Who decides what is a good idea and what is a bad idea?�  Some might say our parents, others might say school, others might even say culture or society tells us.�  Well I know that for me and for a lot of people here, the source of good ideas and bad ideas is the Bible.�  In fact, as we talked about it two weeks ago, there’s a whole book of the Bible that’s dedicated specifically to wisdom.�  Jesus talks a lot about good choices and bad choices too.�  In fact a lot of what he said flipped people upside down about what a good choice was and what a bad choice was.� 

Jesus spends a lot of his time teaching people and showing people what life making wise choices can look like and he tells an interesting story about choices and the people who either listen to him or choose to ignore him and I thought we’d all look at it together.
Matthew 7:24-27
24-25″These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.
� 26-27″But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.”
Jesus wants us to hear his words and put them into practice.�  He says that the people who do this are making the wise choices and the people who don’t are acting pretty foolish.�  I would encourage each of you to continue to explore the Bible, read it on your own, if you don’t have a copy, get one, the Bible is full of stories of people who made wise choices and people who made foolish choices and the consequences of both.� 

This week as you live your life think about the choices that you are making, are they wise choices that fit in with Jesus’ teachings or are they foolish choices that ignore them?� 

Let’s Pray.
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