In The Heart Of The Sea
Stories
Contents
“In The Heart Of The Sea” by David O. Bales
“Remember Their Sin No More” by David O. Bales
In The Heart Of The Sea
by David O. Bales
Psalm 46
Martin should have figured it out earlier. He couldn’t believe how obtuse he’d been. For three weeks after March 12, 2011 he’d thought that Katie’s morose mood was because of their children’s problems. Katie knew herself better than anyone Martin had ever met. She could speak of herself with scientific accuracy: “I’m as well as my children.” It had been that way as long as she’d been a mother and especially now with their son Roger between jobs and their daughter Amy, as she put it, “above the averages” in the ratio of miscarriages to a full term baby. But it was obvious now to Martin that the children’s difficulties weren’t Katie’s only worry, not even her primary problem.
From where he sat in the car Martin gazed at her as she stood silently among spring’s final flowers on the Montana plains beside the little church balanced atop the rise. It had a few shingles blown from the roof and trim hanging ajar beside a window. Katie held her hands on her elbows. A breeze swept wisps of her grey hair across her face as she surveyed the landscape around the near ruin of the church. Martin waited in the car. He finally understood.
Katie had grown up with “nomadic parents” as they labeled themselves. In Katie’s childhood they’d lived in half a dozen cities and towns, all of them in the western U.S. Yet, in the 35 years they’d been married, Martin and Katie never traveled to the west. Katie was an only child and her parents had died. The west held no relatives and only long forgotten friends; but on the evening of March 12, 2011 Katie had wound her way into the garage between the Snap-On tool cabinet and the Shop-Vac. She found Martin bent over a carburetor on the workbench. He dropped a piece of wiry metal into solvent in an ancient coffee can his father had used for the same thing. He turned to her to hear why she’d come to the garage. She didn’t speak for a moment, then almost stuttered, “I’d like to take a vacation in late spring or as early in summer as possible … to Eastern Montana.”
Martin had neither complained nor questioned. “Fine,” he’d grinned. “Your choice this spring. I’ll have the old Corvette back together and we’ll travel in style. Too bad we can’t take Route 66.”
Now on the Montana hillside he watched her from the car, this beautiful woman who still consumed his life as she’d filled his last three and a half decades. She’d told him pieces. He should have known. She was seven and living in Crescent City, California when a Tsunami from Alaska devastated the place. She and her parents were eating supper when water crashed through three windows and swept them across the dining room. “The table cloth floated off right into my face. It was the plastic one with daisies.” The family was fortunate to live at the farthest reach of the wave. The monster soon swept out again, but it pushed the house off its foundation and, as Katie said, “didn’t do much for my foundation either.” She begged her family to move away from the sea. They didn’t need much convincing. Their house and her father’s commercial fishing boat were wiped out.
Within two weeks they’d rented a car and with their few recovered possessions departed Crescent City and never returned. As he drove away her father had said to her, “the mountains shook in the heart of the sea. We’ll go where we can’t even see a mountain.” Three days driving landed them seventeen miles outside Circle, Montana where for five years the family had worshipped in this small community church on the plains. When Martin set himself to recall Katie’s stories of her youth, those were her happiest years.
If Martin had been more alert, he’d have remembered how stories of earthquakes disturbed her. If the television showed the results of an earthquake, she either turned it off or left the room, often clutching her arms around her and squeezing her lips tightly. She didn’t want to bother others with her fears. Obvious to Martin now, the news of the March 2011 tsunami had undone her.
Although he yearned to leap from the car and rush to her, he knew her well enough to leave her alone out there with her Montana memories. He watched her and suffered for her and turned his thoughts to this ramshackle church festooned by flowers already shriveling in summer’s approach.
Katie glanced toward him and saw him staring with her at the church. She looked down and began dragging each footstep through the grass as she walked to the Corvette. Martin didn’t move when she got in and sat. He waited for her to reach her hand onto the console. He placed his on hers. She said, “That building and I haven’t weathered well, but I really needed to come here again. Can’t even see a mountain.”
They sat silently for half an hour, then with a roar, Martin drove them away, starting toward eastbound I-94, relieved to be traveling home, even if not on Route 66.
Preaching point: God strengthens believers in this uncertain world.
* * *
Remember Their Sin No More
David O. Bales
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Colin realized he was on his back. Straps held his body tightly and he was being bounced. A siren vibrated all around him. It felt like it took an hour, but he was finally able to open one eye to a slit and see an Emergency Medical Technician who bit his lip nervously. The few seconds of consciousness was all he needed to determine he was in an ambulance. The last thing Colin recalled before that was stepping into the crosswalk toward his office building as he did every morning by 7:55. But now with his twilight ability to think he didn’t aim his concentration upon the immediate past. With a mere scrap of his mind to work with, only one thing from the past mattered and that one thing vaulted him toward the future.
Fear of death propelled his limited thinking toward having to face God. His childhood pastor often spoke of the horror of facing God in the judgment. He scattered warnings of mortal sins and eternity throughout his sermons as children throw sand at the waves. Colin had heard all the standard—even the best—Christian reasons to act morally and not to sin. That’s why, since he was 17, he’d been haunted by the thought of facing God. He’d sinned, knew he’d sinned. It was an embarrassing out-of-his-character sin and no matter how he’d attempted to approach God on tip-toes to admit the sin and explain the circumstances, he was never satisfied he’d thoroughly confessed the harm he feared his sin might cause to others. Worse, he was never certain God forgave him.
Throughout his life this one sin and his dread of facing God in judgment occupied Colin’s dreams. Always in the dream God waited somewhere to condemn him, and this nightmare God didn’t always just wait, but inched toward Colin with heaven’s final calculation of eternal condemnation.
It was Colin’s private sin. No one knew, never his childhood friends nor his wife who often woke him as his screams shook the dust off the bedroom light fixtures. No matter his weeping, shaking, or sweating, he couldn’t tell her the content of the dreams or what he knew to be the source.
In a dream God approached as a gelatinous tornado sweeping the ground like an atomic powered vacuum cleaner sucking ever closer to his feet. God charged him as a warrior swinging a sword the size of a building, the ugly thing shouting and announcing his sin as it spun over the warrior’s head. One dream started quietly in a green, rolling field only to see locusts rise and devour it in an instant and then form into a person walking toward him buzzing with red eyes glowing like stop lights.
He was disturbed for weeks by the dream of his high school English teacher who was his favorite teacher and his friend beyond those years. He’d see Mr. Schultz at the black board chalking the day’s writing assignment. His perfect handwriting crafting: “300 words. Use three infinitives. What is your greatest sin?”
After dreams of his parents’ shaming him at a family reunion, or a dozen shepherds beating him with their staffs, or a church rolling downhill to crush him, the dream of a glowering judge slamming his gavel on the bench with the sound of a car crash was almost a relief.
He heard the EMT say something and felt his touch, but he couldn’t respond. His limping brain was circling his entire existence around the only reality worth considering: meeting God and having to fully confess. The ambulance stopped abruptly. With one more bounce Colin was there, a double there. He was there rolling into the Emergency Room and also there in God’s presence. His breathing became erratic.
A woman’s voice said, “What was his pulse when you picked him up?”
The EMT mumbled. Colin asked himself, did I say that?
He felt his consciousness expanding like the inside of a balloon until it filled the whole Emergency Room. Every movement around him, although he remained immobile, was somehow his movement, and every sound, although he was silent, became his own … or was it?
The woman’s voice, also seeming to go through him, asked, “Didn’t you write down anything?”
Along with the EMT he could only float another mumble.
The woman’s statement reverberated through him, “If you didn’t write it, just tell me and I’ll scratch it in here.”
The lights on the ceiling became a dozen dazzling suns shining in Colin’s eyes. He was as speechless as the EMT being questioned, while God seemed to stride toward him dressed in white and carrying a clipboard.
Colin concentrated on this shining, smiling God when the woman again spoke, “We must know the patient’s complete initial condition.”
His life was speeding up and slowing down at the same time as the EMT’s trembling voice again became his own, “I made a terrible mistake.”
“We’ve got to have some accounting,” Colin and the woman said, at which instant all life united in Colin’s mind. The white-shining, clip-boarded God stepped closer to lay a hand on Colin’s forehead and the EMT’s statement became God’s words to Colin, “I don’t even remember it.”
Preaching Point: God not only forgives our sins, but also forgets them.
*****************************************
StoryShare, October 31, 2018, issue.
Copyright 2019 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“In The Heart Of The Sea” by David O. Bales
“Remember Their Sin No More” by David O. Bales
In The Heart Of The Sea
by David O. Bales
Psalm 46
Martin should have figured it out earlier. He couldn’t believe how obtuse he’d been. For three weeks after March 12, 2011 he’d thought that Katie’s morose mood was because of their children’s problems. Katie knew herself better than anyone Martin had ever met. She could speak of herself with scientific accuracy: “I’m as well as my children.” It had been that way as long as she’d been a mother and especially now with their son Roger between jobs and their daughter Amy, as she put it, “above the averages” in the ratio of miscarriages to a full term baby. But it was obvious now to Martin that the children’s difficulties weren’t Katie’s only worry, not even her primary problem.
From where he sat in the car Martin gazed at her as she stood silently among spring’s final flowers on the Montana plains beside the little church balanced atop the rise. It had a few shingles blown from the roof and trim hanging ajar beside a window. Katie held her hands on her elbows. A breeze swept wisps of her grey hair across her face as she surveyed the landscape around the near ruin of the church. Martin waited in the car. He finally understood.
Katie had grown up with “nomadic parents” as they labeled themselves. In Katie’s childhood they’d lived in half a dozen cities and towns, all of them in the western U.S. Yet, in the 35 years they’d been married, Martin and Katie never traveled to the west. Katie was an only child and her parents had died. The west held no relatives and only long forgotten friends; but on the evening of March 12, 2011 Katie had wound her way into the garage between the Snap-On tool cabinet and the Shop-Vac. She found Martin bent over a carburetor on the workbench. He dropped a piece of wiry metal into solvent in an ancient coffee can his father had used for the same thing. He turned to her to hear why she’d come to the garage. She didn’t speak for a moment, then almost stuttered, “I’d like to take a vacation in late spring or as early in summer as possible … to Eastern Montana.”
Martin had neither complained nor questioned. “Fine,” he’d grinned. “Your choice this spring. I’ll have the old Corvette back together and we’ll travel in style. Too bad we can’t take Route 66.”
Now on the Montana hillside he watched her from the car, this beautiful woman who still consumed his life as she’d filled his last three and a half decades. She’d told him pieces. He should have known. She was seven and living in Crescent City, California when a Tsunami from Alaska devastated the place. She and her parents were eating supper when water crashed through three windows and swept them across the dining room. “The table cloth floated off right into my face. It was the plastic one with daisies.” The family was fortunate to live at the farthest reach of the wave. The monster soon swept out again, but it pushed the house off its foundation and, as Katie said, “didn’t do much for my foundation either.” She begged her family to move away from the sea. They didn’t need much convincing. Their house and her father’s commercial fishing boat were wiped out.
Within two weeks they’d rented a car and with their few recovered possessions departed Crescent City and never returned. As he drove away her father had said to her, “the mountains shook in the heart of the sea. We’ll go where we can’t even see a mountain.” Three days driving landed them seventeen miles outside Circle, Montana where for five years the family had worshipped in this small community church on the plains. When Martin set himself to recall Katie’s stories of her youth, those were her happiest years.
If Martin had been more alert, he’d have remembered how stories of earthquakes disturbed her. If the television showed the results of an earthquake, she either turned it off or left the room, often clutching her arms around her and squeezing her lips tightly. She didn’t want to bother others with her fears. Obvious to Martin now, the news of the March 2011 tsunami had undone her.
Although he yearned to leap from the car and rush to her, he knew her well enough to leave her alone out there with her Montana memories. He watched her and suffered for her and turned his thoughts to this ramshackle church festooned by flowers already shriveling in summer’s approach.
Katie glanced toward him and saw him staring with her at the church. She looked down and began dragging each footstep through the grass as she walked to the Corvette. Martin didn’t move when she got in and sat. He waited for her to reach her hand onto the console. He placed his on hers. She said, “That building and I haven’t weathered well, but I really needed to come here again. Can’t even see a mountain.”
They sat silently for half an hour, then with a roar, Martin drove them away, starting toward eastbound I-94, relieved to be traveling home, even if not on Route 66.
Preaching point: God strengthens believers in this uncertain world.
* * *
Remember Their Sin No More
David O. Bales
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Colin realized he was on his back. Straps held his body tightly and he was being bounced. A siren vibrated all around him. It felt like it took an hour, but he was finally able to open one eye to a slit and see an Emergency Medical Technician who bit his lip nervously. The few seconds of consciousness was all he needed to determine he was in an ambulance. The last thing Colin recalled before that was stepping into the crosswalk toward his office building as he did every morning by 7:55. But now with his twilight ability to think he didn’t aim his concentration upon the immediate past. With a mere scrap of his mind to work with, only one thing from the past mattered and that one thing vaulted him toward the future.
Fear of death propelled his limited thinking toward having to face God. His childhood pastor often spoke of the horror of facing God in the judgment. He scattered warnings of mortal sins and eternity throughout his sermons as children throw sand at the waves. Colin had heard all the standard—even the best—Christian reasons to act morally and not to sin. That’s why, since he was 17, he’d been haunted by the thought of facing God. He’d sinned, knew he’d sinned. It was an embarrassing out-of-his-character sin and no matter how he’d attempted to approach God on tip-toes to admit the sin and explain the circumstances, he was never satisfied he’d thoroughly confessed the harm he feared his sin might cause to others. Worse, he was never certain God forgave him.
Throughout his life this one sin and his dread of facing God in judgment occupied Colin’s dreams. Always in the dream God waited somewhere to condemn him, and this nightmare God didn’t always just wait, but inched toward Colin with heaven’s final calculation of eternal condemnation.
It was Colin’s private sin. No one knew, never his childhood friends nor his wife who often woke him as his screams shook the dust off the bedroom light fixtures. No matter his weeping, shaking, or sweating, he couldn’t tell her the content of the dreams or what he knew to be the source.
In a dream God approached as a gelatinous tornado sweeping the ground like an atomic powered vacuum cleaner sucking ever closer to his feet. God charged him as a warrior swinging a sword the size of a building, the ugly thing shouting and announcing his sin as it spun over the warrior’s head. One dream started quietly in a green, rolling field only to see locusts rise and devour it in an instant and then form into a person walking toward him buzzing with red eyes glowing like stop lights.
He was disturbed for weeks by the dream of his high school English teacher who was his favorite teacher and his friend beyond those years. He’d see Mr. Schultz at the black board chalking the day’s writing assignment. His perfect handwriting crafting: “300 words. Use three infinitives. What is your greatest sin?”
After dreams of his parents’ shaming him at a family reunion, or a dozen shepherds beating him with their staffs, or a church rolling downhill to crush him, the dream of a glowering judge slamming his gavel on the bench with the sound of a car crash was almost a relief.
He heard the EMT say something and felt his touch, but he couldn’t respond. His limping brain was circling his entire existence around the only reality worth considering: meeting God and having to fully confess. The ambulance stopped abruptly. With one more bounce Colin was there, a double there. He was there rolling into the Emergency Room and also there in God’s presence. His breathing became erratic.
A woman’s voice said, “What was his pulse when you picked him up?”
The EMT mumbled. Colin asked himself, did I say that?
He felt his consciousness expanding like the inside of a balloon until it filled the whole Emergency Room. Every movement around him, although he remained immobile, was somehow his movement, and every sound, although he was silent, became his own … or was it?
The woman’s voice, also seeming to go through him, asked, “Didn’t you write down anything?”
Along with the EMT he could only float another mumble.
The woman’s statement reverberated through him, “If you didn’t write it, just tell me and I’ll scratch it in here.”
The lights on the ceiling became a dozen dazzling suns shining in Colin’s eyes. He was as speechless as the EMT being questioned, while God seemed to stride toward him dressed in white and carrying a clipboard.
Colin concentrated on this shining, smiling God when the woman again spoke, “We must know the patient’s complete initial condition.”
His life was speeding up and slowing down at the same time as the EMT’s trembling voice again became his own, “I made a terrible mistake.”
“We’ve got to have some accounting,” Colin and the woman said, at which instant all life united in Colin’s mind. The white-shining, clip-boarded God stepped closer to lay a hand on Colin’s forehead and the EMT’s statement became God’s words to Colin, “I don’t even remember it.”
Preaching Point: God not only forgives our sins, but also forgets them.
*****************************************
StoryShare, October 31, 2018, issue.
Copyright 2019 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
