This news item caught my attention and then generated this post. A German fisherman found a bottle with a postcard in it and the date May 17, 1913 was legible over the stamps. Researchers were able to identify the author through the address on the postcard. It's believed the bottle was thrown into the Baltic Sea by a 20 year old man on a nature hike and then it floated on the cold waters for 100 years. The message on the postcard reads "Please state where and when this card was found, and then put it in the nearest Post Office. You will be informed in reply where and when it was set adrift. Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea."
Romance writer Nicholas Sparks wrote a novel which was turned into a film titled Message In A Bottle where a man who lost his wife writes a letter, places it in a bottle and tosses it into the waters off of North Carolina. The bottle is found shortly afterwards and what follows is the plot of the book and the film.
We have been vacation people who loved our many trips to the beaches of the East Coast and are hoping to return to the Outer Banks of North Carolina again this year. The photo you see on the left is from a recent trip to Hilton Head. I can't remember how old our son was, I'm guessing maybe eight or ten, when we started a little tradition. You can find them in just about every store on the boardwalk.....little bottles about two inches high half-filled with sand and tiny sea shells. I would buy about a half a dozen of them, pull the cork, and place an evangelistic message of some sort inside and then our son and I would walk the beach and toss the bottles into the waves. Surely after so many years some of them are still floating. Maybe five years ago I started putting a little Christian message card with this blog's URL on it in those bottles. Yes, I still throw them into the sea and if our son is along we do it together, and he's twenty-seven years old now.
It's been debated for centuries....does God elect us or do we choose him? I believed the latter for the first ten years of my Christian walk but then came to see that it is impossible to choose Christ with a fallen nature and that God, in His infinite mercy, elects some who after regeneration do indeed see their fallen condition and cry out for the Savior. Many just do not realize the chronology of events but all rejoice in the opportunity to tell others of Jesus Christ who redeems the lost, loves the most unlovable and then uses them, in many different ways, to put their own message in a bottle.
If you are interested, there is a valuable resource on the web at www.refnet.fm. It's 24-hour Internet radio and describes itself this way "...committed to the historic Christian Faith......Preaching, Teaching, News, Music, & Audiobooks."
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Political Thought and the Christian
