Vanity Island

It was in the mid-1990's that I came face to face with the wealth gap.

I was walking down the gas pier on Peter Island in the British Virgin Islands. I had arrived via dinghy from our moored Hylas 55; a Taiwanese-built sailboat designed for serious bluewater cruising. We had chartered the boat out of St. Thomas and were doing two weeks of island hopping. In short, I was feeling rich, famous, and very full of myself.

The gas dock was dominated that morning by a 135-foot yacht, brilliantly maintained and gleaming in the Caribbean sunshine. Down the pier towards me strolled a gentleman ten or so years my senior. He was wearing boat shoes, non-descript shorts, a well-worn blue polo, sunglasses, and a tattered baseball cap. He seemed to be snapping pictures of the yacht with a little hand-held camera. What got my attention was that after taking each picture, he’d immediately look at the back of the camera.

As we neared each other I said hello and he returned my greeting in a very posh British accent.

He then paused and asked, “Have you seen one of these?” holding up the little camera. I didn’t have a chance to answer when he said, “It’s digital, look.”

With that he turned the back of the camera toward me and scrolled through the pictures he had just taken. I was suitably amazed, and he offered a short explanation as to how it worked.

“Is this your boat?”, I asked, “or just the object of your photography interest this morning?”

I had already noted that the boat had Plymouth as the hailing port painted on the transom. I surmised that this gent’s accent might mean they were connected.

He acknowledged that yes it was his craft and that he and his wife spent a portion of each year in the Virgin Islands. While their home port was Plymouth, he and his wife lived in Exeter.

I then asked the question that separated our worlds and sorted the chalk from the cheese.

“How long does it take you to come from Plymouth to the Virgin Islands.”

With a quizzical expression on his face, he replied, “our staff brings the boat here. We fly.”

Well, Shazam Goober. If you have the money to own a $30 million yacht you have a crew who can deliver the boat to any damned place in the world. And you then miss out on the joy of commode hugging during those ferocious Atlantic storms.

As I walked away, I just might have given myself a head smack at the stupidity of the question.

But it did clarify just how far out of this guy’s league I was.

I thought of this embarrassing moment when my men’s Bible study group took a rare voyage into the book of Ecclesiastes last week.

While The Byrds used the wisdom of Solomon in their 1965 release Turn, Turn, Turn, we typically only hear about the seasons of life in funeral liturgy. You know, the “for everything there is a season” message.

But when you read the rest of the book, you get the bad news that most of our lives are consumed by vanity. In some translations, that word is interpreted as “meaninglessness”. Ouch. Just when we crawled out of the pandemic ditch and started reveling again in the fruits of our labors, along comes some smarty pants king to tell us we’ve got our eye on the wrong ball.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that, as one of my colleagues pointed out, those selfish material goals that we have in our lives give us temporary, fleeting pleasure. If I only had that car, that boat, that watch, that Ping driver, I would be so happy.

Once attained, we repeatedly learn the same lesson. The emotional orgasm doesn’t last nearly as long as the payments. One is measured in days, the other in years.

As our group leader pointed out, world #1 professional golfer Scottie Scheffler had the sports world in an uproar recently when he made this same point. While he loves the game of golf and the competition, true happiness does not lie in winning championships. It is family and faith first, and vocation second.

Eric Henry Liddell, Scottish sprinter, rugby player, and missionary, while a fierce competitor on the track, understood that the real race had to do with fulfilling another more important victory. In the “Chariots of Fire” version of his life, he is oft misquoted by the screen writers, but one thing that he actually said is this:

You see, each one of us is in a greater race that any I have run in Paris, and this race ends when God gives out the medals.

There is happiness awaiting those who truly reprioritize their lives.

We just celebrated what would have been the first birthday of my youngest grandchild. Sadly, a brain tumor took her from us, and we are in various stages of recovery from this unspeakable tragedy.

But in celebrating this milestone, we were again reminded that Lilly taught us what love truly is and how utterly meaningless it renders everything else by comparison. It is not that our lives are meaningless, but the material things that we mistakenly value are vanity of vanities and utterly meaningless.

We spent some amazing family time this past Saturday and when we were all leaving the party, my daughter passed out gallon-sized plastic bags to each of us. The bags contained a bottle of water, a variety of snacks and toiletries, and a note that said that these modest gifts were being given in memory of Lilly. We were asked to give them away this week to people on the street corners of our city as an act of loving kindness. I plan to refill similar bags in the days and weeks ahead and always have at least one in my car.

In the days ahead, as we run the race, help us to be sure that we are running the right race. Help us to remember that we can’t heal all of the wounds or right all of the wrongs. We can only serve the next person that stands before us.

May God bless you.