Never lost at sea

"Our family had been scuba diving and had surfaced into an imminent squall."

By Joanne Leedom Ackerman

The waves rose around us, and rain hit the water from low dark clouds as we surfaced off the bottom of the ocean. A dim outline of the shore lay on the horizon four-and-a-half miles away. The nearest boat was only a shape well beyond the sound of our combined plastic whistles. Our family had been scuba diving and had surfaced into an imminent squall.

The boat that was to pick us up appeared over the tops of the waves heading in the opposite direction almost half a mile away. After twenty minutes of whistling and shouting, our dive-master shed his tank and life jacket and struck out for the boat. After another halfhour when neither the dive-master nor the boat returned and we were starting to feel cold, we realized we had better start swimming for the very distant shore.

"If a man were drowning in mid-ocean with apparently no human help at hand, there is a law of God which, when rightly appealed to, would bring about his rescue." This statement is from the article "God's Law of Adjustment" by Adam H. Dickey (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1971). Though we were not drowning and we weren't quite in mid-ocean, we were very far from shore, and our boat had now disappeared entirely from view, so there was no human help that we could see. The increasing turbulence also suggested that boats would be getting off the water.

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