The Old Man and The Pelican

It was dark, very dark outside the small cottage.  Jimmy sat by a small desk looking at his reflection in the window.  He glanced down at the well-worn Bible closed on the small, cramped desk.  “Who was this ‘Pastor Jim’ and why did an old man give me his Bible?”  He looked back at the window and his reflection greeted him again.  ‘What a journey.  From the pier to here - and now with a wife and son.  Lord, you have been so wonderful to me.  I don’t deserve Your love for me, but I am grateful, so grateful.’  Tuva appeared in the reflection and then he felt her slender arms rest on his broad shoulders.  “You need more rest, honey!”  She kissed the top of an ear and leaned her head against his.  “How do you think this will all turn out?”  Jimmy looked at his wife in the reflection.  “I don’t know yet, but I do know one thing for sure; as Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:12: ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.’”   Oorah!

AΩ

She was terrified.  She knew that if she made the slightest slip, the smallest mistake, she would vanish from the face of the earth without a trace.  He could do that – he would do that!  There was no way out; no way of escape.  She stared out at the vast Pacific Ocean. ‘I would be better off dead.  Who would care anyway?’  Her hands each clutched a stone embedded in the masonry wall she leaned against.  A tear splashed between them.  ‘No one!  Absolutely no one!’