An Old Guy And
A Bucket Of Shrimp This is a true
story, hope you appreciate it and want to pass it along.
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 say 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: Eddie
Rickenbacker.
He
was a famous hero back in World War II.
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: Eddie
started Eastern Airlines.
Great story,
and it's true!
![With a few potent words, the political leaders and statesmen who signed the Declaration of Independence unleashed the power of opportunity and initiative in America. Free enterprise was an important element in their grand experiment in liberty. The Founders laid the foundation for a free enterprise system in clear, simple terms. They wrote: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Inherent in the Declaration of Independence is the idea of earned success. That’s what the Founders were talking about when they promised the right to pursue happiness. They
didn’t guarantee happiness—nor did they intend for the government to dole it out. Instead, they conceived a nation where success was defined by the individual and achievement was determined by hard work and merit. The Founders also intended a limited federal role to preserve individual freedom. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the document, envisioned a wise and frugal government. He said that it should restrain men from injuring one another, [but] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. With government in its proper, limited role, entrepreneurship would drive the development of a great nation. Jefferson noted that agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Left largely to their own devices,
Americans cultivated the land to feed their families and sell their goods for a fair price. They invented things that improved life and innovated ways to produce and sell them in mass quantities. They embraced a free market system that fostered competition and generated wealth. And they pioneered their way across the land, creating more opportunities for those who came to our shores to pursue their dreams. Some 10 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founders drafted the Constitution, which still governs our system today. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government they had established. He famously replied, A republic. If you can keep it. This Fourth of July, let’s remember that we’ve got to fight to keep the system that celebrates individual freedom, guarantees opportunity, rewards merit, and delivers prosperity. Free enterprise is just as essential to our future as it was to our past.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vrfFpLZk6t5t775MJc7_6uh8Gmi38153RNdpDNUIkbiJDoxgDlLRw1syxpjqu9k4Swrv8YynwSMCrMk2xzvBKi4skVxTRTpA-fviYIOdZ5xT4iGLzF193nMMsa-cDj0JwBxcqHJQ=s0-d)
