Physically and mentally exhausted, Mrs. Bernice Brown was rescued by the U. S. Coast Guard from bleak, uninhabited Anacapa Island where she had been marooned for fourteen days. Her husband and a friend who sailed with them out of Santa Monica Harbor were drowned in the mountainous waves which sank their boat, and she was left alone.
“We ran into a heavy storm,” Mrs. Brown told her rescuers. “Our little boat was whipped around like a feather in a windstorm. Then a huge wave flooded the engine and, with our power off, we had no chance. When the boat was swamped, I clung to the bow. But I was washed away as though I were a fly. When I came up again, both men were gone. I didn’t see them again.”
Tossed from the tops of giant combers to the depths of the troughs, Mrs. Brown was drowning with seawater when she floundered against a gas drum. She hung on to it for hours until, at nightfall, she saw a big rock jutting out of the water. With her strength almost gone, she struggled to it and lay there exhausted until the next morning, when she was able to swim three hundred yards to Anacapa Island.
On Anacapa she might well have expected to starve, for it is uninhabited and there is no natural means of existence. Nevertheless, she found a hut once used by the navy containing emergency rations, barrels of rainwater, blankets and a battery radio.
Cut and bruised in the wreck of the boat, exhausted by the long struggle, she collapsed and for a while was barely able to move enough to feed herself. At last on the third day she was able to build a fire on the beach, and she kept it lighted until she was rescued.
Imagine yourself in Bernice Brown’s place, washed “as a fly” from the bow of the boat and floundering for hours in the storm-tossed sea, and you will understand something of her joy at spying that great rock in those turbulent waters, and later at finding food and water and shelter on that barren island!
You may never be caught in a storm at sea, but you may have discovered that, as far as your spiritual experience is concerned, the sea of life all about you is roaring and you have been swept helplessly from every ship of good works and religious rites and traditions to which you have desperately tried to cling. And, at the present moment, you may be floundering desperately between hope and fear as the deep darkness threatens to engulf you.
But see directly before you-unshaken and unshakable-is the great Rock of Ages, Christ Jesus. You may hide safely in Him and see the storm give place to a great calm as you sing:
Oh, safe to the Rock that is higher than I,
My soul in its conflicts and sorrows would fly;
So sinful, so weary, Thine, Thine would I be;
Thou blest Rock of ages, I’m hiding in Thee.
You will find in Him the shelter and supplies needed for all time until He leads you at last to the heavenly haven of rest. “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:3232He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)).