The Boat Guy

I found myself this weekend in an unusual situation...I experienced extreme conviction over a hypothetical situation in my mind. Let me explain. This weekend was our annual Back to School Lake Retreat with the youth group. Unfortunately we experienced a lot of technical difficulties with the boat we had brought for tubing. During the afternoon John Wallace and I took the boat up to the marina to see if they could fix the problem. To our dismay the owner told us the motor on our boat was an older model that the mechanic shop does not work on. But to our surprise the boat mechanic stopped working on the boat he had in his shop and came out to help us with ours. He tinkered with it for a good 30 minutes, trying his best to fix our motor. Even when he was unable to he went to great lengths to offer suggestions to us about what we could do, gave us phone numbers of places we could call to get more help and even steered us clear from going to some "shady mechanics" in town. He did all this while he could have been working on a paying customer's motor. Instead he took time out of his schedule to help us out. My conviction came when I honestly couldn't say I would be doing the same thing if I was him. Here's a guy who more than likely was not saved, and yet was acting very "Christian" by helping someone in need. Unfortunately I fear that in my flesh I would have blown me and John off and simply said "I'm sorry but we don't work on older motors like that here." I'm very thankful for the boat guy's willingness to help us with our motor. I'm even more thankful though for the lesson the boat guy reminded me of that day...to focus on the needs of others before my own.