Adrift in the Sea of Life

By James Lewis

"Adrift" is a place many of us find ourselves in as the distractions of the world attempt to take our focus off Jesus. Satan finds a chink in our armor and aggressively wears at it until we either seek help from God or give in to temptation. If we give in, are we doomed to destruction? This question and many others are explored through scripture in Adrift in the Sea of Life. There are many ways to become adrift. A person can literally be lost at sea, or simply drift from day to day empty of purpose or direction. Both examples are used throughout this book to illustrate how God is with us in all situations regardless whether we chose to call on His name or not. There is nothing magical about seeking God nor are there any conditions for receiving redemption from the One who loved us so much that he bore our sins on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice. God loves you and He is always with you. All He asks is that we turn from our sinful nature and seek His face. Learn how others have stopped drifting and set their feet on solid ground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Lewis
• Release date: Nov 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370335428

James Lewis

JAMES W. LEWIS is a novelist and freelance writer published in several books that include Zane’s Caramel Flava, Chicken Soup for the Soul (two series), Gumbo for the Soul, Truth Be Told: Tales of Life, Love and Drama and Don’t Forget your Pepper Spray. Magazine credits include 3AM Magazine, Eyeshot, Dare Magazine, Naptural Roots Magazine, Lucrezia Magazine, Circle Magazine, Rundu Bedtime Stories and an upcoming article in the fitness magazine AFAA. His debut novel SELLOUT will launch in July 2010. After spending twenty years in the Navy, James retired from active duty and now moonlights as a personal trainer while completing his studies in Kinesiology. In addition to writing, he loves to DJ and has a collection of over 300 vinyl records. He also does extensive volunteer work at a local veterans assistance center. James hopes to resume his role as a Big Brother in the Big Brothers & Big Sisters program soon.

Book preview

Adrift in the Sea of Life

By Jim Lewis

Distributed by Smashwords

©2017 Lewis

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), ©2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Note

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by Katie Zaske Gleason, Hamilton, MI.

Contact the author at:

[e-mail]

About the cover

The images on the cover are intended to reflect the sinful nature that we all have dealt with at some point in our lives or may currently be dealing with. The person in the boat has taken the position of reaching out to the One who can relieve us of the baggage of our sinful nature and wash it all away.

Table of Contents

The Author’s Testimony

Meet Lauren Chapin

Introduction

Part One

Drifting Away

In the Beginning

In Our Beginning

The Devil at Our Heels

Rebelling Against God

Christian Home Versus Christ-centered Home

Part Two

Lost at Sea

Are We Ever Really Lost?

You Are Never Lost - God

Searching for God While Trying to Hide

Believing and Trusting

Every Christian was Lost at Sea at One Time

Emmanuel - God With Us

God’s Amazing Grace

God Can Mend Anyone

Literally Lost at Sea

Part Three

On Solid Ground

How Just is Our God?

Oh, the Joy of Being on Solid Ground

The Path to the Rock

Is Anyone Lost Forever?

Jesus is the Way - The Only Way

We are All the Same Distance from God

Bibliography

Excerpts from other works by the author

The Good Life - According to God

Invisible Heroes - Role Models for Christ

The Author’s Testimony

As you will discover, this is a book about redemption. Jesus redeemed us all by bearing our sins on the cross. We don’t have to, nor are we capable to, do anything to earn the gift of salvation that He lavished upon us except to acknowledge and accept Him as Lord and Savior. The distance between where I was and where I now am is both miniscule and monumental. He bridged that gap with His saving grace.

I was born and raised in a Christian home. At least I perceived it to be a Christian home. All the right trappings were in place. My mother was the church organist and pianist for almost 40 years. My father was my Sunday school teacher, Superintendent of the Sunday school, and Clerk of Sessions. They were both members of the Mariners group and mother was active in the church’s Mission Circle. Why would I believe that my family was anything but Christian?

I seemed to be the odd ball in our family. I was smoking and drinking at an early age, my language was pitiful, I engaged in petty larceny, skipped school and even tried to hang the preacher’s son. All of that could be written off as growing up in a small town in the 1950s and 60s, but it was, and still is, a shameful past that grew even more shameful as I got older and left town for the military. When I was on my own I could do all the sinful things that I dreamed about back home. Even marriage didn’t slow me down. My self-assuming life lead to divorce. That was sort of a wake-up call, but like others that I profile in this book, the wake-up call didn’t last too long. I didn’t break every Commandment from God, but you don’t have to break too many before you find yourself in a pit of self-destruction that you are unable to extricate from on your own. How did I get out?

In the early 90s, my wife and I recognized there was an emptiness in our individual lives and our life together. We loved each other deeply, but we needed more. As we started seeking fellowship with others in our local church the void began to fill. Promise Keepers was coming into prominence in the mid-90s and some of the men from my church attended one of the venues. They returned alive with the Holy Spirit. I longed for the excitement, energy and passion for the Lord that they shared with us. The following year, 1996, a large contingent of men attended Promise Keepers in Pittsburg. I was apprehensive and eager at the same time. I was apprehensive about showing my weakness and eager to have the Holy Spirit wash over me in a renewal baptism like none other.

What an exhilarating event it was. Fifty-thousand men gathered in one place was over whelming. Several alter calls were made the first day, but I resisted them all. I just couldn’t let my friends see that I lacked the joy of knowing Jesus as they did. However, the second day was different. My resistance weakened. I didn’t care what my friends thought, Jesus was calling me. I bound down the steps and headed for the center of that massive stadium. It was the most humbling experience of my life. I don’t know how I got there, but I found myself on my knees, pouring out my sinfulness at the foot of the cross. I felt the Holy Spirit fill me with a joy that I had never experienced before. It was the beginning of a new life, a life sustained by the Living Water of Jesus. The same struggles and temptations would be awaiting me outside that arena, but now I had the armor of God to protect me.

When I shared the experience with my father he told me something that he had kept secret for a long time. He said he hadn’t accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior until he was forty-six. All the time I was growing up I assumed he was a Christian. It was refreshing to know that I wasn’t so much of an odd ball after all. Since then I have discovered that a lot of men hadn’t accepted Christ until later in life. One of the men who attended that Promise Keepers event recently told me that he accepted Christ that day as well. You will find his story here along with many others who have been washed clean by the blood of Jesus and filled with the Holy Spirit. His name is Mike Adams.

Contrary to what Satan tried to convince me of, I was never alone in my journey to redemption. God was with me all the time. I hadn’t thought about my life as a journey, but looking back, I can see that it has been. What did the journey look like? Imagine, if you will, how an evergreen tree grows. The branches grow further from the trunk at the bottom than at the top. My journey resembles the branches on that tree. In my early years I stayed close to the trunk. At some point I began to stray and kept straying until an event got my attention and I scurried back to the trunk (my relationship with God). After a time, I would stray again, but not quite as far. Then I would recognize the error of my way and scurry back to God. The journey continues to this day, but as my faith matures and the strength of my armor increases, I drift a shorter distance from the trunk. My prayer is that God will continue to forgive me for my weaknesses and that my trunk will be straight and true when He calls me home.

I discovered that I hadn’t been alone in my journey and neither are you. God is with us always. We are His children, and, like every loving and caring father, He wants nothing more than to have us share His home. My hope is that this book might be instrumental in inspiring you to turn and seek God’s face. He loves you no matter how undeserving you consider yourself to be and He is waiting.

****

Meet Lauren Chapin

I want to introduce you to a member of my family. At least she is family in the broad context of God’s children and we are cousins through Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Her name is Lauren Chapin. I discovered that Lauren and I have more in common than just being family. Some of the commonalities are things neither of us are proud of, but they comprise what we are today so we are both happy to have taken the journey of life to its present point. We are the same age and we both grew up in an entirely different world of temptation than young people are exposed to today. That had been the perception I held for many years anyway. In 2017, I met Lauren and discovered that there was a side of her life that was impossible for me to relate to. Let me tell you about the Lauren Chapin that she shared in her testimony at the gathering where I met her.

If you don’t know Lauren Chapin, don’t feel badly. Unless you are over 60 or a fan of old television, you may never have heard of her. She was Kathy Kitten Anderson on the hit television show Father Knows Best of the late 1950s. The show was supposed to represent the typical family of that time and maybe it did. My family bore some resemblance to the Anderson’s. In that era, there were several television series’ that demonstrated the same close-knit family relationships that were seen every week on Father Knows Best.

I was born and raised in South Dakota, where the most trouble we ever got into was soaping windows on Halloween or stealing from the neighbor’s watermelon patch. Oh, we would sneak cigarettes from dad’s pack or find a way to get a beer or bottle of hard-stuff, but otherwise life was pretty innocent. When I joined the Army, I came face to face with a world that wasn’t part of the Sunday night TV schedule. I didn’t know racial prejudice and hatred was so prevalent in America. I also had never heard of drugs in the context that soldiers from California or New York talked of them. The only drugs I knew of were purchased at the pharmacy for a cold or the flu. My world was pretty small.

Lauren Chapin lived in my small world, too, at least on television. Her smiling face, freckles, and pigtails garnered a lot of young fans for the show. She was honored with 5 Junior Emmys for Best Child Actress. Her Anderson family life was pure joy compared to her life outside of TV. That life was anything but tranquil. The Wikipedia site for Lauren provides a glimpse into her world outside of the Anderson family.

Before, during and after Father Knows Best was in its original broadcast run, Chapin had a troubled childhood. Following the series’ cancellation in 1960, Chapin later told a reporter in a 1983 interview:

I couldn’t get a job. I’d been typecast as Kathy Anderson. The more I didn’t work, the more my mother drank and the more belligerent I became. I started running away from home. I became an incorrigible child.

Earlier, in 1981, another newspaper reported, ‘When acting roles failed to materialize, Chapin found work as a flight attendant, dog groomer, insurance claims examiner, carhop, and cocktail waitress.’

Chapin married at age 16 and was divorced at 18. (An article published January 2, 1981, in The Washington Post says that she, ‘separated from her husband within two years. They divorced five years later’). She became a drug addict, turned to prostitution to support her habit, and was sent to a psychiatric institution after she attempted suicide. In addition to using drugs, she sold them in San Francisco, California, and was arrested for forging a check in Hollywood, California. She acknowledged, ‘That was the beginning of several years in and out of jail.’

Her own Website doesn’t mention the dark side of her past, but she shares it freely through personal testimonies around the world. That is how I came to meet her. In an informal session after her presentation she gave me permission to paraphrase her testimony from a CD titled, I Want to Spend My Life Mending Broken People.

Lauren began her testimony with a challenge, This is the day that the Lord has made, what are we going to do with it? The audience responded, We will rejoice and be glad in it. Ponder that simple question and response. All that we have comes from God. He made everything we see, touch, interact with, enjoy and are blessed to use for our needs. Why wouldn’t we rejoice and be glad. But, there are people who don’t make that connection. Lauren had been one of them.

She told about the awards and accolades she had received as a child actor and that she had been named honorary mayor of three different cities in the Midwest. By her account a person might think that she was a success, but she said, I was broken. What good is it to gain the world, yet lose your soul?

When she began to share her testimony with the world she struggled with the Devil who was trying to dissuade her. Satan argued that people were going to see all the bad and ugly things that she had done and they would reject her. There was a scripture passage that haunted her as well. Lamentations 5:7 reads, Our fathers sinned, and are no more; and we bear their iniquities. That was a powerful statement to burden someone like Lauren with. She had little exposure to the New Testament so she wasn’t aware that Jesus had taken her sins to the cross at Calvary. Satan didn’t want her to be exposed either.

Lauren’s family had spent a lot of time facing away from God and she was adrift as well. Her mother and grandfather were alcoholics. Her father had molested her many times in her adolescent and teenage years. Her younger brother had molested his own daughter and he, too, was an alcoholic. Her mother committed suicide when Lauren was 21. Lauren had attempted suicide when she was 12, 15, and 21. She slit her wrists so badly that it is now difficult for her to use her hand. She felt like God had pushed her away and abandoned her.

A young woman burdened with the sins of her parents. That kind of punishment from a loving and merciful God seems so unjust, but it fit Lauren’s knowledge and awareness of God at that time. Her parents had never admitted sorrow for the way she had been treated. She said the hatred in her parent’s home was so thick, It could be cut with a knife. Since Lauren hadn’t been forgiven, she couldn’t forgive.

By the time she was 23 there had been two failed marriages; she had lost 8 babies; her grandmother had died and her mother had committed suicide; she had been beaten by her brother; and she had