...from my cousin Bill...
An Old Guy And A
Bucket Of Shrimp:
It happened every
Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembled a giant orange and
was starting to dip into the blue ocean.
Old Ed came strolling
along the beach to his favorite pier... Clutched in his bony hand was a bucket
of shrimp. Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has
the world to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now.
Everybody's gone,
except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed
is alone with his thoughts... and his bucket of shrimp.
Before long, however,
he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots come screeching and
squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end
of the pier.
Before long, dozens of
seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly. Ed
stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he does, if you listen
closely, you can hear him whisper with a smile, 'Thank you. Thank you.'
In a few short minutes
the bucket is empty. But Ed doesn't leave.
He stands there lost
in thought, as though transported to another time and place.
When he finally turns
around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds hop along
the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and then they, too, fly
away.
And old Ed quietly
makes his way down to the end of the beach and on home.
If you were sitting
there on the pier with your fishing line in the water, Ed might seem like 'a
funny old duck,' as my dad used to say. Or, 'a guy who's a sandwich shy of a
picnic,' as my kids might say. To onlookers, he's just another old codger, lost
in his own weird world, feeding the seagulls with a bucket full of
shrimp.
To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They can seem
altogether unimportant .... maybe even a lot of nonsense.
Old folks often do
strange things,
at least in the eyes
of Boomers and Busters.
Most of them would
probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida . That's too bad. They'd do
well to know him better.
His full name
was: Eddie Rickenbacker. He was a famous hero back in World War II,
winning the Medal of Honor. On one of his flying missions across the Pacific,
he and his seven-member crew went down. Miraculously, all of the men survived,
crawled out of their plane, and climbed into a life raft.
Captain Rickenbacker
and his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought
the sun. They fought sharks. Most of all, they fought hunger. By the eighth day
their rations ran out. No food. No water. They were hundreds of miles from land
and no one knew where they were.
They needed a miracle.
That afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a miracle.
They tried to nap. Eddie leaned back and pulled his military cap over his nose.
Time dragged. All he could hear was the slap of the waves against the raft...
Suddenly, Eddie felt
something land on the top of his cap.
It was a
seagull!
Old Ed would later
describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his next move. With a flash of
his hand and a squawk from the gull, he managed to grab it and wring its neck..
He tore the feathers off, and he and his starving crew made a meal - a very
slight meal for eight men - of it. Then they used the intestines for bait...
With it, they caught fish, which gave them food and more bait... and the
cycle continued. With that simple survival technique, they were able to endure
the rigors of the sea until they were found and rescued (after 24 days at
sea...).
Eddie Rickenbacker
lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the sacrifice of that
first life-saving seagull.. And he never stopped saying, 'Thank you.' That's
why almost every Friday night he would walk to the end of the pier with a bucket
full of shrimp and a heart full of gratitude.
Reference: (Max
Lucado, "In The Eye of the Storm", pp..221, 225-226)
PS: Among his incredible accomplishments,
Eddie started Eastern Airlines.
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