For the last week, my family and I spent a great week aboard the Carnival Splendor in pursuit of sun, fun, relaxation and family time. We found all of that...including a bit too much sun (ouch!). But life is never just life—even on vacation, I can't help but observe the human condition and the world around us. And so there are a few things I noticed and learned as we traveled.
Going on a cruise seems to give people permission to be rude, self-centered and impatient. We saw some of the best of human nature on board the Splendor; the crew who served us (long days!) were kind, gracious and welcoming. And while we may say, "Well, that's their job" (and that's true), everyone gets irritable from time to time. And yet the crew with long days and few hours off continued to serve well. The passengers, however...well, that was another story. People very often were pushing, shoving, demanding, cursing and insisting that things happen their way. One man cussed out a crew member because of a gratuity that was added to his bill. Another woman yelled at a man who tried to help her up when she stumbled. It's witness to the human condition of original sin. Left to ourselves (and given a "free" buffet), we will always insist on our own way. (It was an extension of what I experienced in Israel, the "Holy Land Tourist" syndrome, only much worse.)
The food. Oh my goodness, the food! There should be a "weigh in" and a "weigh out." Or a Weight Watchers club that meets on board.
People can consume a lot of alcohol in a short amount of time. And, by the way, there were regular AA meetings on board. Just an observation.
Wifi is really bad at sea and not as plentiful in island nations as it is here in the United States. Yeah, that probably adds to people's irritability, but it didn't stop people from staring at their phones constantly. We, as a culture, have an addiction to little screens. We can't relax even when we've paid a lot of money to relax.
I grew increasingly concerned with the clothing some people wore, and I'm not talking around the pool. I'm talking about the sexually explicit t-shirts some men (and it was all men I saw) wore on shore and in other places on the ship. What disturbed me the most was not the messages, but that there were women who were with these men. Women—do you not realize how degrading those messages are to you? They're not cute, they're not funny, they're demeaning. Such messages attempt to reduce each woman, a beautiful creation of God, to a mere sex object. I thought those days were behind us. Men: it's not funny to shame or degrade your wife, girlfriend or any woman, or to reduce her solely to a body image. (Women, it's not funny to do that to men, either, but as I said, the experience here was with men doing it to women.)
One final (more positive) observation: the ocean is really, really big. It's amazing to be out there were you can't see anything, not even another ship, for miles and miles and miles. No land, no other people, not even birds or any other kind of wildlife (though there is, of course, plenty of wildlife below you). The ocean just goes on forever, it seems. It made me think of people who have been in a wreck or otherwise somehow stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. How would you even know which way to row? But it also made me think of the old hymn:
Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Loving-kindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout heav’n’s eternal days.
God's love is as vast as the ocean—deep beyond imagining, and it goes on as far as you can see or imagine. I have a new picture in my mind for that love...and a new gratitude as well.
If you haven't heard the hymn above, here's a fairly recent recording of it. Allow the words to wash over you...like an ocean...and find gratitude for God's never-ending love.
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