#Stranded March 26

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Today contribution to the 30-Day Letter Writing Coach4aday Challenge is on being STRANDED.

The challenge involves composing a letter to yourself when you were an earlier age. The goal is to focus on a value, habit, or choice that needs to be adopted or made.

Today’s letter is a life lesson that got brought to life two years ago. It involved a large container ship in the Suez Canal being stranded and turned sideways. It was an obstruction that caused many other ships to become stranded.

Day 26-Letter about being stuck.

April 2021

Dear Reflective Dan:

So today you began to wonder about the container ship Ever Given being stuck in the Suez Canal.

Often when something or someone gets stuck the first question asked is how did it happen? Well in the case of the Ever Given it was on its way to the port of Rotterdam from China when it became stranded in the Suez Canal. This happened after a sandstorm blew through the region. Visibility plummeted and wind gusts reached speeds of up to 31 miles per hour. The wind and lack of visibility had it run into the banks of the canal and get turned sideways.

Life Lesson

When you are attempting to free something as massive as a container ship lots of ideas and efforts were used. Came across a great article in Popular Mechanics on some of the efforts. The engineers trying to free Ever Given used earth moving equipment, tugboats, and adjusting the ship’s ballast. Yet in the end the determining factor was Mother Nature and the “Spring Tide” that occurred on Sunday March 28, 2021. A Spring Tide occurs twice a month. You can’t hurry it along it arrives on its own schedule.

In life we sometimes arrive at place that appears to have us trapped. We encounter winds of resistance and cannot see a way out. We become grounded and we flail away trying to move. We often forget that there are solutions and forces greater than our individual powers.

An obstruction in the Suez Canal will reinforce to you that the secret to changing your status in life requires patience, the power of nature, and prayer to get us back on course again.

Reflective Dan