Fat Guy in a Fat Boat

A sailboat is as close as humankind can come to approximating the wondrous beauty of God’s creation. When we raise sail, we acknowledge that we can conjoin with the forces of nature to create an image of kinetic beauty that occupies a moment or two of time, like a shooting star or a flash of lightning—glorious and troubling together. Aboard, the sailor is hard at work to keep sail and helm perfectly poised against the wind. Observers on the shore, however, aren’t aware of the sailor's effort. They only stare in admiration as the sailboat in the distance glides gracefully through the waves, yielding happily to the wind like an alluring woman to the embrace of her lover. There is no other manmade structure that so summons us to contemplation of its beauty.