Chuck's Blog

The Man Who Thanked the Sea Gulls-Eddie Rickenbacke

Old Eddie

It happens every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembles a giant orange and is starting to dip into the blue ocean.
Old Ed comes strolling along the beach to his favorite pier. Clutched in his bony hand is 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. Invariably, one of the gulls lands on his sea-bleached, weather-beaten hat – an old military hat he’s been wearing for years.
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
that’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 lifesaving 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.

(Max Lucado, In The Eye of the Storm, pp.221, 225-226)

PS: Eddie was also an Ace in WW I and started Eastern Airlines.

Chinese Wal Mart

Dinner tonight from your local Wal-Mart! Click below.

Maybe I will ask the manager of the local Wal Mart if he has……….

When You’re Holding a Hammer (Everything Looks Like a Nail)

Tennessee Football Coach fired for making Obama song. He’ll make more money when this song becomes a big hit than he would teaching school.
Tennessee middle school assistant football coach, age 26, fired for a song he wrote and played!
This could be the next number one hit country song. It’s the best effort yet at encapsulating the outrage at the oversteps of this government in an entertaining song.
Apparently, the guy was fired over the song because some parents complained. If you like it, help it go “viral” by passing it along to everyone you know.

Gator fight on golf course

“The Duck Man” saves the Day!

Banker_Saves_a_Dozen_Ducklings_From_Ledge_Video_-_ABC__

A Stunning View from Space

OBAMA NOW HAUNTED BY HIS EX-POLITICAL MENTOR

Alice Palmer, the avowed communist who helped launch Barack Obama’s career, continues to haunt Obama even today.

In 2008, Palmer showed up at the Democratic National Convention in Denver as a Hillary Clinton supporter, still resentful toward Obama for knocking her and three other candidates off the ballot for an Illinois state Senate seat some 13 years earlier by challenging voter signatures.

“The Democratic primary, what I witnessed, was one of the most appalling, disgusting things I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Hollywood-based digital photographer Michele Thomas told WND in a joint interview with Hollywood film producer Bettina Viviano.

Thomas began as a volunteer for the 2008 Clinton campaign then launched a petition drive when she learned the Democratic National Committee was not going to allow delegates to cast their votes for Clinton at the convention.

“I just felt like the entire process was being eviscerated and rules were being changed all along to ensure that no matter what, Barack Obama was the nominee,” Thomas said.

Watch and listen to video:

Our smile for the day….

Could not be said any better . . .

Muslim Brotherhood Has Infiltrated Conservative Movement!

I found this to be one of the most disturbing videos I have seen. Most of us have been hopeful that conservatives would man the front lines in the on-going war with radical islam but they (conservatives) are being infiltrated too. There is no real hope that liberals will stand up to this ever growing threat and now this…. As Christians we must put away our love affairs with materialism and secular pleasures and pour our resources into spreading God’s Word to the whole world before it is too late!! Does this sound overly dramatic? You may want to believe it is….I truly fear it is not!

Today’s Quote:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
Give a man a welfare check, a forty ounce malt liquor, a crack pipe and some Air Jordans and he votes Democrat for a lifetime.