Tugboats and Christ

Jo and I stole away to Louisiana this weekend for a few days of genealogical research and rose rustling (taking cuttings from antique roses in order to try and transplant them in our own garden back in Bosqueville), and since we couldn't find a place to stay near Cottonport or Mansura, we're toughing it out in a hotel on the banks of the Mississippi River just across from Natchez, Mississippi. Sitting just now on the banks of what some call The Big Muddy or Ol' Man River, I feel an odd kinship with Mark Twain and half expect Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to come rafting by. But instead of glimpsing rafts and paddle wheelers, I'm reliving a childhood pleasure watching a whitewashed tugboat chug up the Mississippi. We would often navigate our way to the nearby ship channel when I was a boy in Port Arthur, in order to watch the ships pass. It was cheap entertainment -- just the cost of driving ten miles to get there and back, and gasoline was cheap enough in those days. I loved every minute of those quasi-nautical outings and could sit mesmerized for hours, literally watching the world go by. The vessels I most enjoyed were the tugboats. I've always felt an odd affinity with those worker ants of the channel: Small. Compact. Useful. One might even say Necessary, particularly if you're a barge. These diminutive marine weight lifters are powerful, able to do more than one would expect, or that it even knows about itself. Tugboats have the character of an English bulldog -- Winston Churchill on the mighty Mississipp.  No river royalty for these crafts -- leave that for the paddle wheel steamers. No, tugs are more akin to river roadies. They do the hard work. There's nothing flashy about them, but they go about their aquatic assignments with a great amount of understated style. Tugboats exert immense force seemingly effortlessly. Attention inevitably shifts to the bulky but impotent vessel in front carrying precious cargo, but the crew and any well-initiated onlookers know where the credit belongs. It belongs to the pug nosed boat below and behind. Would I be stretching the analogy to say I hope to be a kind of human tugboat?  What I mean simply is that I want Christ to gain all the credit for anything good in my life, and am content to be a dependable vessel doing the Master's will until my course is finished and I hear him say, "Well done..."