At the top of my legal pad I wrote: The most important factor in our testimony is thankfulness. Those words brought to my mind a story I read a few years ago.
It was thankfulness that prompted an old man to visit a pier in Florida for a very special reason. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket.
Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. Then for nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts.
But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take a miracle to sustain them, and a miracle occurred.
Captain Rickenbacker loved to tell people why he was so thankful for seagulls:
Stranded in a raft, we read from the Bible and then prayed, and then sang a hymn. The heat was oppressive. I pulled my hat down to keep out some of the glare, and dozed off. Then something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull! No one said a word, but I could see the expression on the men’s faces. That gull meant food if I could catch it, and I did!
And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. Captain Rickenbacker never forgot.
I pray we would never forget the great sacrifice that was made for us through Jesus Christ. And that we would not only express our thanks to God, but to love telling others why we are so thankful.
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