Chapter One

When Your Best Friend's Gone

That was then.  Today Cynthia felt compelled to defy her mother as she remembered the bitter words of her mother.  Something had been driving her for weeks now and Cynthia Wilson decided that she needed to be near the strong but fading memory of her father.  Even though she had been warned by her mother to never come to this place, the balmy 87 degree weather with cool ocean breezes cascading the locks of her lustrous hair, forced her, as though some hypnotic power beyond her control, to come to her secret place beside the water.

“I remember daddy saying” she would say out loud to herself, ‘Lead me beside still waters, they restoreth my soul.’ “Daddy was right. What could be better?”

Cynthia first stooped down on the sand and picked up an oddly shaped sea shell.  Before long she found herself stretched out on the sand with her feet dug into the warm and humidity drenched wet sand.  After an hour or so, she laid down on the remote strip of land whose only border was God’s horizon and the earth’s ocean.

About four in the afternoon, Cynthia fell asleep in a lullaby sung by the ocean’s song. Dozing in, dozing out she felt her eyelids become heavier and heavier until she felt her body drifting on a cloud so restful as to not be believed.

Certain she was dreaming Cynthia heard the pleasant voice of what she thought was a young boy shouting, “hey you, you’re drifting, can you swim?”

“What a pleasant dream” Cynthia said in her mind’s voice. “Dad was right, dreaming is the best; but the voice became more ominous and hurried.”

“Hey you, you out there” the voice said in panic tones, “you’re gonna drown.”

Sensing fear now, Cynthia decided to break from her dream and open her eyes to the annoying voice of her dream.  Opening her eyes she looked up.  Nothing was as it should have been.  Water was randomly splashing in her mouth and eyes.  In a moments recognition she tried to jolt straight up only to realize that she was now several hundred yards from the beach.  The tide had come in while she was sleep and had carried her out to sea with only the proneness of her little body keeping her afloat.

Refusing to panic she realized she was in danger. She knew she couldn’t swim but she knew how to float. “Be calm” she kept telling herself still hearing the voice on the even more distant shore, “hey, do you need help?”

“Yes” she cried with all the strength she could muster without making the sound of her own desperation throw herself into a panic, “I need help, please help”

“With that she didn’t hear the voice again.  Minutes passed and the ocean’s cadence was broken by a human cry coming even closer, “I’m coming” the voice said, “don’t be afraid, I’m coming.”

She heard the deliberate thrashing as he stroked through the surface waves.  This stranger was growing closer and closer and she was fighting not to panic.  In the moments while awaiting her salvation she thought of her salvation.  She thought of the day she told her parents she wanted to give her life’s purpose to serving the will of the Lord Jesus Christ.  She thought of how pleased her father was that his little girl, at so young an age, seemed to have more than an adult’s understanding of spiritual things.

Those thoughts were quickly doused with the violent splashes of salt water to the face, temples, and throat as well as the dull painful thud of hearing the voice in her mind’s ear of her mom saying “you gave your heart to who!  Are you crazy young lady? You are certainly too young.”  She struggled a bit thinking of the ensuing friction it created between her mom and dad  as all week long her mother pleaded in anger at her daddy, “I told you not to let her start going to that church school.  Morning service is enough. Now look what’s happened.  Well mister just let me tell you one thing, this is your problem, not mine.”

“Clareece”, her father would say in a tone of genuine affection and overt sense of love, “but honey, it’s the right thing, you used to feel that way.” He had said it as a questioning statement but her sarcasm quickly exacerbated the situation.

“When we were dating you said you wanted a Christian home.  I went to church growing up like you did but I didn’t know you wanted a fanatical Christian family.  You don’t want me to wear pants, you don’t want to see adult movies and say the really romantic things to me that husbands are supposed to say to their wives,...”

“But honey, you want me to talk dirty and I won’t say the things you want to hear because they dishonor God.  Besides, if you loved, no I mean, if you studied the Bible you would understand ..... you would understand the freedom God gives us to love each other.  You would understand that physical love between .... oh never mind!”

“I don’t want to understand.  I want a normal decent man, not a priest, after all, there’s more to life than God.”

The pain of old memories and brutal thoughts of the shouts of her parents overwhelmed Cynthia and she felt her body slipping under the water.  At first she noticed her feet and legs beginning to feel as though they weren’t there – as if they were getting limp.  Soon, the water was completely over her chest and tummy. Cynthia felt as if she was slipping at an angle under the water.   She struggled to remain erect and straight but the tension made it impossible for her to relax and settle into a life sustaining beginners back float.

She slipped under the water for just a second and fought to hold her breath but that too had been difficult since the water on her chest made it impossible to fully inhale. She was frightfully thankful when her head bobbed through the surface as she gulped for another desperate breath of precious air.  Cynthia was on her way down for the third time when she felt an arm around her chest and the powerful motion of being yanked from below the surface to the sublime feeling of being pulled along by the tide of life a saving current.   In the confusion Cynthia realized that this wasn’t an undertow but she was being hauled to safety by an unknown arm attached to an unknown body that was kicking in fatigued yet confident undulations to drag her to the safely of a shoreline she knew intimately.

Wanting to struggle because of the choking action of her rescuer, she fought the urge somehow sensing that her discomfort was irrelevant to the bigger picture of saving her life.

home