Pirates of the Caribbean: Practice Obsessively

“I practice three hours a day, so that when I meet a pirate, I can kill it!”

Does anyone in their right mind practice three hours a day of anything? Only someone who is obsessed. For the citizens in Port Royal, the villain of life was a pirate. Will Turner’s imagination held only one person as the bad guy, as evil personified: a pirate. So what did Will do? He devoted his time to perfecting the art of conquering said pirate. To destroy evil, Will felt that he must destroy piracy.

We are barely different from Will. Like Will, we know the evil we fight. Unlike Will, most of us do not devote our time to the art of vanquishing that enemy. Instead, we obsess over the more frivolous things of life: things so foolish that we would laugh at them – if we didn’t do them ourselves. We devote our time to the latest fashion, the hottest date, the newest car, the sturdiest truck, the biggest house, the richer job.

Man was made to obsess, to devote time to a particular project. Our project is just like Will’s. We must devote ourselves to vanquishing the enemy. Our enemy is Satan, our sword is the Bible, and our practice is the amount of time we spend in the Word, memorizing it and putting it into our daily life.

If Will had not practiced sword-fighting, do you think Captain Jack Sparrow would have had to cheat to win. If I’m not mistaken, Jack is not a bad swordsman himself. He shouldn’t have had to cheat. But he did, revealing Will to be his better in the art. Seriously: If Will had not practiced so often with the sword, do you honestly think that he would have survived POTC1 and gone on to have a sequel?

We’ve been given a sword that will never break. We know our enemy and his tactics. All that’s left to us is the devotion – and obsession – to practice.

(originally written on 8/25/06)