Me: What a pretty creek!
Prodigal: Yes, I am enjoying the peacefulness of it.
Me: I can add a story about a creek to our time.
Back in the those days, our family was very poor. We lived in a small house on the Homosassa River, four miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico. My father struggled to make ends meet as a commercial fisherman.
To help, my mother and I would gather oysters when they were in season. Other times, we went into the woods and chopped fallen trees into firewood, which we sold to the people in town. On good days, we could make a dollar or two.
This was 1939. It was a bad time. A lot of people were poor. The fortunate people who had jobs earned 30 cents an hour.
That year, my other joined the Church of Jesus Christ in town. There was no road from our house into town. To get there, we had to go by boat three more miles upstream to the highway and the little village. Even so, my mother was at the church every time the doors opened. She loved the church. It gave her a certain strength that carried her through the ordeal of raising a family in such dark days.
We didn’t have a Bible in our home. We couldn’t afford one. This was a great sadness for my mother. Week after week, she tried to put a few coins aside, saving for enough to buy a Bible, but time and again some emergency would come up, and she had to use the money for food or clothes or medicine. She never complained, but her face showed her hunger for the word of God in our house.
One day my father came home from work with an empty boat. He had caught nothing. He went into the house discouraged, as though he never wanted to look at the river again.
I watched my mother. She got into the boat, arranged the nets, started the motor and headed downstream. As she later told me many times, she went about a mile toward those vast, shallow flats that reach as far as the eye can see at the mouth of the Homosassa. She cut off the motor. Then she knelt in the bow of the little boat, and she began talking to God.
“Father,” she said, “I want a Bible for my home and my children. We don’t have any money, and so I need Your help. Let me catch some fish today and I’ll take them to the market and buy a Bible before nightfall. I have been working hard, trying to get enough ahead to buy a Bible, but I can’t seem to make it. Anything I catch today will be Yours. Please help me.”
She started the motor. Standing up, she threw into the water the staff that held one end of the net. Slowly she moved the boat in a circle to close off the net. Even before she had gone halfway, fat mullet began jumping into the net. And by the time she had completed the circle, the trapped area was alive with flouncing fish. My mother had lived on the river over a dozen years, ever since she married my father at the age of 16, and she had never seen anything like this.
As fast as my mother could empty her catch into the boat, the net filled up again. In an hour, there was hardly enough room in the boat for herself and the net. She headed home.
I was on the dock as my mother arrived. The boat was riding so low in the water that I wondered if it had sprung a leak. Then I saw the cargo. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Come on,” Mother called to me. “We’re going into town to get our Bible.”
We went upstream to the highway, where we borrowed a cart from a farmer, transferred the catch into it, then hurried into town to a wholesaler who sold fish to stores and restaurants. The scales showed that my mother had brought in nearly 300 pounds of fish. The wholesaler paid three cents a pound for the catch–almost ten dollars, as well as my father could do during a good, seven-day week.
We went directly into a bookstore and bought the best Bible the money could buy. My mother let me carry the Bible as we went back to the river and returned the cart. She let me hold it on my lap as she maneuvered the boat back to our home. That evening, my mother read aloud to us from her own Bible for the very first time.
After nearly 40 years, the Bible is still in our family, a bit tattered now from so much use. Every morning, my mother would read the Bible to herself; every evening, she would read aloud to the family. We children studied the Bible as we prepared for our Sunday-school classes. And my mother never tired of telling people how she had acquired it.
In December of 1976, my parents celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. In the special ceremony at our church, my mother and my father held the family Bible between them–living proof that the miracles of the Bible can come alive today for those who have faith enough to believe in them.
Isaiah 32:17
And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
