It sometimes seems to me as though there are only three courses a man can take in life. He is like a ship on the ocean, an ocean dark and restless, with mysterious tides, brooding tempests, strange currents, and ever the cruel rocks from which the Sirens call. He can steer straight for the rocks. Very few do that, though some do so because the Sirens are too much for them. Many take the second course - they decide to drift. And let it be clearly seen that that is just as much a decision as any other. Then, after they have visited the ports of sin, they may take the Pilot on board and conceive the hope that somehow they may find the harbour at sunset. And some do when 'all is but a wreck'. It is a poor return to make of our personality to God.

There is a far finer choice than that. It is to take the Pilot on board in all the glory and purity of life's golden morning; not when sin has been tasted, and turned to dust and ashes in the mouth; not when desire - which seems as beautiful as a child's soap bubble till we grasp it and find only a wet mess in the palm of our hand - has left us more hungry, restless and dissatisfied than before; not when all the ports of evil have been visited and found to be no true harbour of the spirit; but to sail with Christ with all the kingdoms of the world in sight, while life is young and fresh and beautiful

Thus to love, thus to serve, thus to follow, thus to sail in unknown seas with the breath of life in one's nostrils, the wine of life in one's lips, the joy of life in one's heart; this is to find what life is, and why man was created in the morning of the world, when all the stars of God sang together; this is to find the joy Christ had - a joy unquenchable through all the sorrows of His earthly voyaging; this is to find what Paul meant by the 'glorious liberty of the children of God'. This is life. This is conquest. This is adventure. This is religion.

Leslie Weatherhead from The Transforming Friendship