PROLOGUE
During the 32 years that I worked as an educator, I had personal classroom contact with well over 3,000 students and became acquainted with the personal problems, longings, struggles, failures and victories of many of those young people.
Some of their lives—those who were Christians or who, while I knew them, accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior—often experienced journeys of joy and victory (though not without very real testings and trials). Some who heard the gospel seemed so blinded by the angel of light that their response was, as it were, some more convenient day. Other lives, through refusal to listen to earnest counsel, suffered terrible shipwreck even during those brief teenage years. But perhaps most solemn of all, not a few of these journeys of life ended unexpectedly in death before school was ever completed.
While I often sought, as the Lord allowed opportunity, to give Christian counsel (always in great weakness) to those whose journeys seemed almost assured of sustaining a tragic wreck, it was more often than not, rejected.
Thus it is that these personal observations, (not only from public school and college classrooms, but also among believers gathered to the precious Name of our Lord Jesus Christ) have been in large measure, the motive for presenting the following meditation.
It is, as will be quickly apparent, not a doctrinal dissertation of Acts 27 (nor should it be read as such). Rather it is an application of moral principles found in this account given us by divine inspiration.
Douglas Nicolet
March, 2001