Facing Your Torpedoes!

Old Salamander
During the War of 1812, a ship called the Essex sailed to South America, where the precocious David Glasgow Farragut took a captured British ship into Santiago, Chile. His ship was defeated and sank after a cannon blast. He didn’t much care for his ship going down but he sure loved the Navy. 49 years later at the start of the Civil War, Farragut was now a 60-year-old naval Captain living in Virginia. A Southerner by birth, Farragut nonetheless pledged his allegiance to the Union and was given command of a heavy fleet. His orders were to open the Mississippi by taking New Orleans, which he did, and was made the first Rear Admiral in U.S. Naval history. He ran his ships into terrible cannon fire, survived and became known as "Old Salamander." A naval term of endearment for the crusty Admiral.

Sixteen months later, he took the last Confederate stronghold on the Gulf of Mexico in the battle of Mobile Bay. Ready to end the battle, he charged the heavily guarded bay entrance even though it was loaded with mines, then known as torpedoes. When they spotted the deadly explosives, Farragut pointed his saber towards the enemy and cried, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” The stuff of legends.

Heart Breakers
114 years later a Florida boy living in Los Angeles was trying to think of a good title for his latest recording project. It was not a good year for Tom Petty but things were about to get better. The pressure of the music business was getting to him. His Label ABC Records tried to sell his contract to MCA records without Tom and the Heartbreakers even knowing about it. He was angry at the whole system. He was defiant. He decided to go forward anyway, refusing to be victimized. The band pushed forward through every thing that threatened them and recorded a classic which he titled “Damn the Torpedoes!”

It was in that kind of mood; a mood that said, “things might blow up, but I’m going forward,” that Tom and fellow Heartbreaker Mike Campbell wrote a smash hit titled “Refugee.” It’s a song about refusing to lay in defeat and going full steam ahead.

“Somewhere, somehow somebody must have kicked you around someTell me why you wanna lay there and revel in your abandon.Listen, it don't make no difference to me. Everybody's got to fight to be freeYou see, you don't have to live like a refugee.”

Safe Havens
A refugee is somebody that doesn’t have a refuge, a sanctuary or a shelter. Refugees struggle to survive because they don’t have a place of protection.

Miraculous survivor stories tend to have something in common, a place of refuge.

A Japanese businessman survived the Hiroshima blast because he was working in a bank vault. An Indonesian woman survived 5 days at sea after the tsunami carried here away from her family. She did so by clutching a palm tree in the Indian Ocean and eating the fruit and bark of the tree she held on to. Don’t you just love a good survival story?
So does God.

God knows the importance of refuge. He doesn’t offer to build you one; He offers to be your refuge. In Psalms 57:1 David writes, “Be merciful to me oh God. For my soul trusts in you: And in the shadow of your wings I will make my refuge.”

Max Lucado, in his Thomas Nelson book, “Facing Your Giants” says it a lot better than I could. “Make God your refuge. Not your job, your spouse, your reputation, or your retirement account. Make God your refuge. Let Him, not Saul, encircle you. Let Him be the ceiling that breaks the beating sun, the walls that stop the wind, the foundation on which you stand”

Tom Petty says you don’t have to live like a refugee. Jesus says, “Come to me…”

Proverbs 18:10
“The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”

For encouragement or info, please email me at FFTB@OpenDoorMinistries.org.