{"id":3373,"date":"2018-08-08T07:05:20","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T11:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theprodigalpig.com\/?p=3373"},"modified":"2018-08-08T07:32:45","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T11:32:45","slug":"miracle-on-the-homosassa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theprodigalpig.com\/?p=3373","title":{"rendered":"Miracle on the Homosassa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Me:\u00a0 What a pretty creek!<\/p>\n

Prodigal:\u00a0 Yes, I am enjoying the peacefulness of it.<\/p>\n

Me:\u00a0 I can add a story about a creek to our time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Back in the those days, our family was very poor.\u00a0 We lived in a small house on the Homosassa River, four miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico.\u00a0 My father struggled to\u00a0make ends meet as a commercial fisherman.<\/p>\n

To help, my mother and I would gather oysters when they were in season.\u00a0 Other times, we went into the woods and chopped fallen trees into firewood, which we sold to the people in town.\u00a0 On good days, we could make a dollar or two.<\/p>\n

This was 1939.\u00a0 It was a bad time.\u00a0 A lot of people were poor.\u00a0 The fortunate people who had jobs earned 30 cents an hour.<\/p>\n

That year, my other joined the Church of Jesus Christ in town.\u00a0 There was no road from our house into town.\u00a0 To get there, we had to go by boat three more miles upstream to the highway and the little village.\u00a0 Even so, my mother was at the church every time the doors opened.\u00a0 She loved the church.\u00a0 It gave her a certain strength that carried her through the ordeal of raising a family in such dark days.<\/p>\n

We didn’t have a Bible in our home.\u00a0 We couldn’t afford one.\u00a0 This was a great sadness for my mother.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She never complained, but her face showed her hunger for the word of God in our house.<\/p>\n

One day my father came home from work with an empty boat.\u00a0 He had caught nothing.\u00a0 He went into the house discouraged, as though he never wanted to look at the river again.<\/p>\n

I watched my mother.\u00a0 She got into the boat, arranged the nets, started the motor and headed downstream.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She cut off the motor.\u00a0 Then she knelt in the bow of the little boat, and she began talking to God.<\/p>\n

“Father,” she said, “I want a Bible for my home and my children.\u00a0 We don’t have any money, and so I need Your help.\u00a0 Let me catch some fish today and I’ll take them to the market and buy a Bible before nightfall.\u00a0 I have been working hard, trying to get enough ahead to buy a Bible, but I can’t seem to make it.\u00a0 Anything I catch today will be Yours.\u00a0 Please help me.”<\/p>\n

She started the motor.\u00a0 Standing up, she threw into the water the staff that held one end of the net.\u00a0 Slowly she moved the boat in a circle to close off the net.\u00a0 Even before she had gone halfway, fat mullet began jumping into the net.\u00a0 And by the time she had completed the circle, the trapped area was alive with flouncing fish.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

As fast as my mother could empty her catch into the boat, the net filled up again.\u00a0 In an hour, there was hardly enough room in the boat for herself and the net.\u00a0 She headed home.<\/p>\n

I was on the dock as my mother arrived.\u00a0 The boat was riding so low in the water that I wondered if it had sprung a leak.\u00a0\u00a0 Then I saw the cargo.\u00a0 I couldn’t believe my eyes.<\/p>\n

“Come on,” Mother called to me.\u00a0 “We’re going into town to get our Bible.”<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The scales showed that my mother had brought in nearly 300 pounds of fish.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

We went directly into a bookstore and bought the best Bible the money could buy.\u00a0 My mother let me carry the Bible as we went back to the river and returned the cart.\u00a0 She let me hold it on my lap as she maneuvered the boat back to our home.\u00a0 That evening, my mother read aloud to us from her own Bible for the very first time.<\/p>\n

After nearly 40 years, the Bible is still in our family, a bit tattered now from so much use.\u00a0 Every morning, my mother would read the Bible to herself; every evening, she would read aloud to the family.\u00a0 We children studied the Bible as we prepared for our Sunday-school classes.\u00a0 And my mother never tired of telling people how she had acquired it.<\/p>\n

In December of 1976, my parents celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Isaiah 32:17<\/p>\n

And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jennifer Van Allen<\/p>\n

www.theprodigalpig.com<\/p>\n

www.faithincounseling.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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