Mayday!
She worried about her husband on the open sea, but everyone told her he was fine.
My father was a commercial fisherman when I was young and he had to spend long weeks at sea. One day shortly after I turned 10, he was scheduled to be off the coast of Jamaica, far from our home in Miami. Mom was washing the dinner dishes when her face suddenly drained of color. “Mayday,” she whispered. Without even wiping her hands, she grabbed the phone and called the Coast Guard, telling the man on duty she was concerned about her husband.
“Yes, ma’am, we know your husband ran into some trouble,” he replied. “They’re having a heavy storm and he radioed in for help when his boat started taking in water. We flew out there about an hour ago and dropped him a heavy-duty bilge pump.”
“I don’t believe the pump is working,” Mom insisted. “You need to do another fly-over.”
The man tried to placate Mom. “He must be all right, Mrs. Hemingway, or we would’ve heard from him.”
“You haven’t gotten a Mayday?”
“No, but we’ll let you know if we hear anything.” Mom hung up. Without saying a word, she went in and knelt by her bed. An hour passed. Mom came out, looking even more anxious. She called the Coast Guard again. This time she had steel in her voice. “You had better send a plane out right now or you’ll be retrieving the bodies of Leicester Hemingway and his crew.” They said they would send out a rescue plane as soon as possible.
Mom was awake that whole night praying. Early in the morning the phone rang. It was the Coast Guard. They’d found my father and his crew floating in debris 15 miles off Jamaica. Dad’s boat had sunk, but all were safe.
Dad arrived home that same afternoon, weary and sunburned. “The bilge pump they dropped didn’t work fast enough,” he said. “Too much water was coming in. It started pouring over our transom. I radioed in a Mayday, but my call never got through.”
But it had—to Mom.
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Comments
This story reminded me of a
This story reminded me of a similar experience when I was young. My dad was stationed in Japan during the Korean conflict. Several weeks before he was to come home, my mother heard a news report on the radio about a plane over the Pacific that had passed the point of no return and was having engine trouble. My mother said, "That's Garrett's plane!" (Garrett was my dad's name.) I knew he wasn't supposed to be on his way home then, but she felt he was on that plane. She called friends and relatives to ask them to pray. Sure enough, the next day, we got a call from my dad--he was then on the ground in the United States--to say he had an opportunity to come home earlier than expected and wanted to surprise us. He, in fact, had been on the plane that was in trouble over the ocean that my mother had rallied up an army of prayer warriors to literally "lift up" in prayer.
Prayer the powerful
Prayer the powerful weapon!!!
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