Episode Transcript
It's all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of the hurricane. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century. I'm Ann Browning. We were living in Honiara in the Solomon Islands. And my dad, who was a missionary, was on the Lauhini, which was the name of our mission boat. And he'd gone down to the island of Renal and Belina to do his district directors meetings. And they just arrived at the island of Rennell, and they'd gone ahead, gone ashore. All of the crew had gone ashore in the little dinghy, except for Hartley, the engine boy. He stayed on the boat to keep the boat safe. Now, the boat was anchored outside the reef outside the island, while dad and the rest of the staff had gone ashore for the first meeting. So they pulled up the dinghy, tied it to the beach, and then they had to climb the cliff to get up to the plateau so that they could walk to the village. So they went off to the village, and they were having their first meeting. And suddenly the wind began to blow very fiercely, and everybody was looking concerned. But my dad was concerned more than any of them because it seemed to be a very strong wind gathering. And there was only one person on the ship who was Hartley. And my dad knew that he was the engine boy. He wasn't anything else, and he didn't know how to actually steer the ship if there was a dangerous situation. So my dad gathered the staff as soon as the meeting was finished, and he said, we have to get back to the beach and get back to the ship. Now, it was a long walk from the village to the edge of the cliff, and then they had to climb down the cliff. When they got down the cliff, my dad realized that this was much more dangerous than he'd expected. There'd been no weather report to say there was anything serious coming. But my dad said, this looks like the beginnings of a hurricane. I have to get to the ship. But by this stage, the waves were so big, they didn't know how on earth they were going to get the dinghy out because there was only a very little opening in the reef. And. And they would have had to have got the dinghy through the reef, because if the dinghy had smashed against, the reef would have broken the dinghy. And my dad said, we need to pray and ask God what to do. So everybody gathered on the beach with the waves roaring and the wind roaring and the boat. One minute they could see it, the next minute they Couldn't because the waves were so rough. And so they prayed and asked God for direction. When they finished prayer, my dad said to everybody, he said, I feel that I need to swim out to the reef, out of the reef and swim out to the ship. And the local people said, you can't do that, pastor. It's a very dangerous place. It's full of sharks. You can't go there, and you might not find the opening of the reef. And dad says, well, we've just prayed about it. We have to trust that our God can do this. So he took off and began to swim, and he swam and he swam. He said one minute he was up on the top of a crest of a wave, the next minute he was down in the valley of the wave, and up and down he went. And by a miracle of God, he found the opening of the reef, and he got through the opening of the reef, and he kept swimming and swimming and swimming and swimming. And finally, when he was really exhausted, he. He got to the side of the ship, and he's yelling out to hartley, hartley, come and get me. Well, Hartley heard him and came up from the engine room, shocked out of his mind to see the pastor down in the water who'd been swimming all the way out. But he helped my dad up, and by this time, it was really the mid. The hurricane had really strengthened. And my dad said, we can't do anything else but go up and down the side of this island. So my dad would steer the ship, and at the right moment, he'd find the right place on a wave to turn the ship around and go back down the other side of the island and come back and go back and come back. He did that for hours with just him and Hartley on the boat. After a few hours, quite a few hours, the hurricane began to subside to a degree. And the crew on the shore, who'd been sitting there praying the whole time, they finally were able to get in the canoe, find the way through the reef, and come out to the ship. And they decided at that point they needed to leave the ship and go across to Guadalcanal so that they could get back into safety. In the meantime, we are back in Honiara, and the news reports on the radio are telling us that a hurricane had blown in, and all of the ships were accounted for except the mission ship, the Lauhini. And they didn't know where on earth it was or whether it had survived the hurricane. So back at home, we were all praying at the mission station that dad would be fine, and the mission ship would be fine and that God would have his hand over everyone. So Dad's on. On the ship and they are sailing back through these really rough waters, back to Guadalcanal. They arrived at Korpiu, which is a little Adventist village down on the bottom end of Guadalcanal, and it's in a little harbour. And dad said it was unbelievable as they went through into the quiet of the harbour. The next minute he couldn't steer the ship. And they discovered that when they got into that quiet place, the rudder of the ship had fallen off. And my dad was absolutely amazed. He said God had his hand over them because if that had fallen off when they were in the rough seas, they would not have survived anyway. The crewboys dived down. They were able to gather the rudder and bring it up to the ship and they put it on the ship. But dad still had to get back to Honiara to the dry dock where they could fix all this. And. And he had no rudder. Slider had another prayer season and said, lord, what do we do? How do we get back? This is very dangerous. What should we do? By this time, the hurricane had settled a bit, and dad said he realized the ship had two engines. So he figured that if he pushed one engine's motor forward, the ship could speed on that way, push the other one forward. So he did that all the way back to Honiara, going from one engine to the other to try and steer the ship. After a lot of traveling over the ocean, they finally got back to Honiara. And it was an absolutely wonderful experience to see the ship arrive back in home. Back home where we were was just amazing. And dad looked like he had not slept for days. His eyes were red. The wheelhouse window had broken in the storm, and dad said he hadn't slept for nearly 40 hours. By trying to just keep that boat going without being sunk or being damaged other than the window. They finally got back to Honiara and we were able to pray and thank God that they got back safely and nobody had been knocked overboard. It was a safe journey home, even though it was very difficult and very stormy, and they were able to get the ship into the dry dock and get it fixed. But it was with great rejoicing that they were able to pray and thank the Lord not only for getting the boat back to Guadalcanal, but for protecting them from the rudder falling off on the way, or it would have been too dangerous. I don't think anyone would have survived. And these are the things. These stories that I've shared are the stories that have given me great faith that we have a God that is a God of miracles. He cares about us. He wants us to trust him, to lean on him, because he has a way of getting us through very bad and difficult times. So keep remembering that God is gracious, he is kind, and he wants to help us. Thank you.
