“Thank you for visiting Logos Hope, the world’s largest floating book-fair, my name is Chris and I’m from Australia”. I’m speaking on a microphone before a small crowd of people who have just arrived at the ship after a long wait and a bumpy bus ride. They are about to enter the book fair and browse our selection of books, and it’s my job to tell them how to work out the price of the books and where to find the bathroom. In speaking briefly with one of the crowd he said to me “I am so glad that you are open again this week because I was unable to come before – and I brought my family with me”.
You see this week is unlike any other time I have been on the ship. We have been delayed by two weeks in Sri-Lanka because some repairs took longer than we hoped. So we opened the book fair again and sent people out to tell the city that we are open again – but unusually we aren’t hosting any events so there is very little work to do in AV. For this reason I was able to live my dream this week and work in the book fair for 6 days. I have volunteered my time there often when they are short on staff, but only for an hour or two here and there. I have prayed for the opportunity to work there for a longer time without leaving AV and this week God said ‘Yes!’. He is good!
To see first-hand a variety of people of different walks of life and beliefs on the ship and browsing our good books and meeting crew members gives me a new perspective on what God is doing on this ship and new enthusiasm for this ministry.
Monthly Archives: May 2011
Back to basics
“Open your bibles, what does it say: ‘In the beginning God…’ Stop there. Now, who is this book all about? You? No.” In our busy lives on the ship working in AV with programs one after the other sometimes we forget the simplest things. Life is not all about ourselves and what we can get out of it – we didn’t come to the ship to work, that is what we left behind. No, we came to worship – worship with our hands and our heads, with the skills he has given us and with the strength he provides.
Ian Currey from OmniVision came to the ship for a week to spend some time with the AV team training us in the how, what, when and (most importantly) why of AV. Since we have extended our stay in Sri Lanka but we have no events to run – we have been blessed with the time to sit at the feet of someone more experienced and learn some of the things we can’t learn on the job.
Thinking about what Ian said in the training, I noticed that I often look at what I do on a day-to-day business as work, not worship. I am using my own strength to complete the tasks before me and operating as I would in my job at home. Once I was asked to do something over lunch time and I was quite upset that I would miss lunch with my friends. While it’s good to have boundaries and not always say yes – it seems clear to me now that I am not always making my service on board an act of worship to God.
Next year I would really like to go to Omnivision in the U.K. for two or more years. I would be a part of AV for huge Christian events in Europe and creating videos promoting the work that OM does around the world.
