If I could, I would subtitle this “Reflections on Providence: Robinson Crusoe Style”.

Robinson Crusoe is the classic tale of a reckless young man who finds himself shipwrecked and trapped on a deserted island, alone with rescued provisions, strange animals, and trouble thoughts. And though I haven’t exactly been enjoying reading it, the life lessons which run like a current through the tale have been slowly seeping into my brain and traveling down to my heart, forcing me to admit that there is value in reading this tedious, fictional account of one man’s struggle for survival.

Crusoe was all but a religious man before tragedy befell him. But during his time on the island, his thoughts began turning towards the God he had been raised to believe in, but forsaken in his youth, like too many other teenagers. As sickness took him, and death suddenly faced him, he began to feel sorry for his evil ways of the past- and after a frightening dream taught him the reality of God’s justice, he resolved to change his life, and start living it for God.

In the times when despair would befall him, or thoughts of “why me?” depress him, one of his methods for putting things in the right perspective was to remind himself of all the times he should have died, and all of the fatal accidents God had saved him from, despite the fact that he deserved them. I am about halfway through the book, and already he has survived multiple shipwrecks, including one in which all the other crew members died, has been lucky enough to land on an uninhabited island, when the surrounding lands were laden with cannibalistic savages and wild beasts, escaped a slave master, and managed to support himself for years, using provisions which miraculously survived the wreck. To sum it up, he says, “…but I resolved it at last all into thankfulness to that Providence which had delivered me from so many unseen dangers and had kept me from those mischiefs which I could no way have been the agent in delivering myself from, because I had not the least notion of any such thing depending, or the least supposition of it being possible,”.

God saw him through all of these misfortunes, and saved him from countless others, and though at first Crusoe did not understand why, he came to realize that- had he not been saved, and given so many new chances at life- he never would have come back to God, never taken the time to consider how much God had blessed him, and would have most likely spent the rest of eternity in Hell, if God had not sent him to live in the middle of the ocean, isolated from the rest of the world. Crusoe becomes so thankful for this that he begins to praise God for his rotten situation, and to glorify Him for sending him to a deserted place, where he had time to sort through is life and amend it, forced to give up the sins and distractions of the modern world.

And so, when life seems rotten, or the world cruel, I’ll try to remember the philosophies of Crusoe, who recommended that those who are full of self-pity or complaints “…consider how much worse the cases of some people are, and their case might have been, if Providence had thought it fit,”.

Because, after all, I should have been dead a long time ago…