Article April 14, 2014 Issue

A boat and a blessing

Florence L. Frederick

Many years ago, while I was a young mother, my next door neighbor and two of his buddies decided to purchase a brightly colored, 20-foot long dilapidated wooden boat, which they intended to restore. They parked their boat and trailer on the narrow strip of grass separating our driveways under my plum tree. The neighbor assured me that this was only temporary and the boat would be moved soon.

But as the days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, I learned that my neighbor’s buddies had lost interest in restoring the boat, and had abandoned their project, leaving the boat beside my house to weather, peel, and fill with rainwater and plums. Naturally, the boat appealed to all the neighborhood children, who often played onboard the increasingly unstable structure, which prompted my neighbor to yell regularly at the children to “stay off the boat!”

When I spoke with my neighbor and his wife about removing their boat, they said they were trying to sell it but weren’t getting any buyers. That’s when I started to pray. For guidance, I searched the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. When I read, “A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive” (p. 463), I thought: “That’s it! That ‘offensive’ boat must and will be removed!”

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