A few years ago I was in a small boat on Lake St. Clair, located between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. The day started off quite well. Fifteen minutes after we anchored I was reeling in a 30 inch muskie, and was very excited (I didn’t realize that is actually relatively small for that species).

We caught a few more fish, and we laughed and talked for a while until Walt looked up at me and said, "Uh oh."

You don’t have to be an English major to interpret that phrase. I wasn’t certain what was happening, but I turned to look where he was looking.

The darkest clouds I have ever seen were headed our way, and that was the direction we needed to travel to get home.

To make a long story short, it took us two hours to go three miles against that wind. It was raining buckets, and water was coming over the side of the boat in sheets.

I dumped a cooler of cold drinks into the lake and used it to bail. I’ve never been more cold or wet than when we finally hit the shore. At one point in our struggle a helicopter hovered over us long enough to see that we were going to make it.

But before it arrived I have to admit that I had my doubts.What do you do when you are afraid you might die? Where do you turn? In the last two chapters of Acts we read about Paul being in a shipwreck. The calm spirit that he exhibited during that storm is truly amazing. I know that you can tell me that God spoke to him personally and promised that he would not be injured, but it still takes faith to trust God that much.

After all, God has spoken to all of us personally. In His Word, the Bible, He says, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." I know that there have been times when we have all felt forsaken. We have wondered if we were alone. But we have the promise of God to fall back on. He will never leave us nor forsake us. We can take Him at His word. We can trust Him. We are never alone.

In that promise there is no promise that we will never face tough times. There are Christians in the midst of the fires in the Waycross area. Every church in one town in Kansas was destroyed by recent tornadoes. No, we will not escape difficult times. But God will not fail us. He will not leave us. We can trust in Him.