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“One thing thou lackest” (Mark 10:21).
I have recently been reading an interesting book about a sailing expedition in the year 1742. Several ships set out from England on a mission that would take them into the Pacific Ocean. That meant sailing across the Atlantic Ocean and around “Cape Horn,” the southern tip of South America. Cape Horn has some of the most dangerous seas in the world, so those outfitting the ships put in everything they thought the men might need—dried beef, hard biscuits, plenty of fresh water, guns, and many other things.
But several months into the voyage, many of the men began to get very sick. They lost weight, their teeth fell out, and their muscles shrivelled up. Some of the men died. No one knew what was wrong, but they were lacking one thing—vitamin C. Today we understand this. The men had “scurvy” because they had no fresh fruit or vegetables in their diet.
Eventually they were shipwrecked on a small island where hardly anything grew, but they found some wild celery and ate it because they were starving. Within a short time the disease of scurvy disappeared! Tomorrow we will talk about the spiritual meaning of today’s verse.
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