The world is a funny place.
This morning I am heading back out to a Russian ship that I did some work on yesterday. When I was on board yesterday I caught a glimpse of the crew list and saw that the country of birth for most of the crew was listed as USSR.
My, how times have changed!
I was commissioned as a Naval Officer about 6 months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now the Navy brass was a bit more skeptical than the diplomats that things really had changed for the better at the time, I guess, because they didn’t change their training programs right away. When I went through the USSR was still the enemy we were trained to fight.
My job was to find submarines. We trained for Soviet tactics. When I went up to Maine to the Navy’s survival school we trained with a backdrop of having been shot down in a fictitious country behind the Iron Curtain.
And now here I am some 15+ years later working closely with a Russian crew. The same people. But the country has changed and their flag has changed.
That really isn’t all that unique in world history. The Bible is full of changes like that. The Old Testament is filled with story after story of countries changing alliances and going from enemies to friends.
The New Testament has a prime case of that on a personal level. There was this guy named Saul of Tarsus who went around arresting, torturing, and even killing followers of Jesus because he thought they were evil. Amnesty International would have had a field day with this guy.
Anyway he ended up converting to the very faith he so violently attacked. He even went so far as to become its greatest champion. He even wrote about half of the New Testament.
The world is a funny place.
Anyway I’ve got to run out to the ship that would have been an enemy of ours back in the day.
Enjoy!
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