August 2 | Moments Almanac | Rescue

Welcome to Scattered Moments. This is a time for us to remember the people, places, and events that leave fingerprints on the soul. The sea has a way of deciding who lives, and on two separate August 2nds, more than a century apart, the sea might have changed the course of history. On August 2, 1786, in a small church on Gold Street in New York City, a former prisoner of war knelt to be ordained. Three years earlier, Stephen Gano had been a young Continental Army surgeon captured at sea and marooned with dozens of other prisoners on a stretch of Turks Island, left to survive on whatever the tide brought in. For days he waited there, starving, watching companions die of disease around him. Certain of his own death, he wasn't right with God, and in the wreckage of that island he knew it. When a prisoner exchange finally reached him, Gano went home a changed man, and within a few years he surrendered his life to Christ. And on this day, august second, in seventeen eighty six, the son of a Baptist evangelist stood before his own father, and a circle of ministers to be ordained into the gospel ministry he had once wanted no part of. He went on to pastor the first Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island for thirty six years, growing the congregation from one hundred and sixty five members to six hundred and forty-seven and sending members out to plant five new churches across the region. A man the sea had nearly claimed, spent the rest of his life pulling others toward the shore. One hundred and fifty seven years later, almost to the day, another young man learned a similar lesson in those same waters. On august second, nineteen forty three, a Japanese destroyer sliced through the darkness of Blackett Strait and cut Lieutenant John F. Kennedy's patrol boat PT one hundred nine cleanly in half. Two crewmen died instantly, and the rest were thrown into the water burning with the spilled fuel. Kennedy gripped the strap of a badly burned sailor in his teeth and towed him for hours through the current to a distant island. For days the survivors hid on tiny scraps of land with almost no food and no rescue in sight, until Kennedy swam out again. Searching the strait for any passing boat, two Solomon Island scouts eventually carried a coconut shell scratched with a desperate message back to the Allied base, and all but two of the crew made it home. The ordeal marked Kennedy for the rest of his public life, long before anyone imagined that he would one day lead a nation. Neither Gano or Kennedy heard a voice from heaven rising above the waves, yet both emerged from the sea carrying the realization. The years ahead were no longer theirs alone. The apostle Paul wrote, Whether we live therefore or die, we are the Lord's. There are moments when that truth ceases to be theology and becomes biography, a battlefield, a prison camp, a sinking boat, a hospital room, a lonely highway after midnight. Some people can point to the exact day they realized every morning afterward was borrowed. Rarely Grace arrives with Van Vere. More often it comes disguised as another sunrise, another breath, another undeserved chance. And every rescue seems to carry the simple, gentle question What will you do with the life you have been given? Stephen Gano answered by preaching Christ for thirty six years and helping plant churches across New England. John F. Kennedy answered by refusing to abandon the men entrusted to him, carrying the memory of those desperate days into every chapter that followed. Two shipwrecks, two men, one God who reminds us that every rescued life is meant to become a gift to someone else. And that's Moments Almanac for August the second. Hope you'll join me tomorrow. Until then, take heart. Notice the scattered moments, and cheer the grace, and then you can't.