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Inspirational Stories


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#1 caligirlz

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Posted 13 July 2012 - 08:00 AM

I came across a wonderful story today that I wanted to share. It does not fit into the joke section, so I thought I'd start a new topic. Please add stories that inspire you. :D:

Old Guy And A Bucket Of Shrimp
This is a true story,

It happened every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembled a giant orange and was starting to dip into the blue ocean.

Old Ed came strolling along the beach to his favorite pier.. Clutched in his bony hand was a bucket of shrimp. Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has the world to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now.

Everybody's gone, except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed is alone with his thoughts...and his bucket of shrimp.

Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier.

Before long, dozens of seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly. Ed stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he does, if you listen closely, you can hear him say with a smile, 'Thank you. Thank you.'

In a few short minutes the bucket is empty. But Ed doesn't leave.

He stands there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and place.

When he finally turns around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and then they, too, fly away. And old Ed quietly makes his way down to the end of the beach and on home.

If you were sitting there on the pier with your fishing line in the water, Ed might seem like 'a funny old duck,' as my dad used to say. Or, 'a guy who's a sandwich shy of a picnic,' as my kids might say. To onlookers, he's just another old codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the seagulls with a bucket full of shrimp.

To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They can seem altogether unimportant .... maybe even a lot of nonsense.

Old folks often do strange things,
at least in the eyes of Boomers and Busters.

Most of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida . That's too bad. They'd do well to know him better.

His full name: Eddie Rickenbacker. He was a famous hero back in World War II. On one of his flying missions across the Pacific, he and his seven-member crew went down. Miraculously, all of the men survived, crawled out of their plane, and climbed into a life raft.

Captain Rickenbacker and his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought the sun. They fought sharks. Most of all, they fought hunger. By the eighth day their rations ran out. No food. No water. They were hundreds of miles from land and no one knew where they were.

They needed a miracle. That afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a miracle. They tried to nap. Eddie leaned back and pulled his military cap over his nose. Time dragged. All he could hear was the slap of the waves against the raft..

Suddenly, Eddie felt something land on the top of his cap.
It was a seagull!

Old Ed would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his next move. With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the gull, he managed to grab it and wring its neck.. He tore the feathers off, and he and his starving crew made a meal - a very slight meal for eight men - of it. Then they used the intestines for bait.. With it, they caught fish, which gave them food and more bait.......and the cycle continued. With that simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of the sea until they were found and rescued (after 24 days at sea...).

Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the sacrifice of that first life-saving seagull... And he never stopped saying, 'Thank you.' That's why almost every Friday night he would walk to the end of the pier with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of gratitude.

Reference:

(Max Lucado, "In The Eye of the Storm",pp..221, 225-226)


God Bless our Troops

God Bless America
.............................

I had to verify the facts on this before forwarding it. Snopes had nothing but Wikidedia did. Here is what they had to say:

Adrift at sea

One of Rickenbacker's most famous near-death experiences occurred in October 1942.[23] He was sent on a tour of the Pacific Theater of Operations to review both living conditions and military operations, and also to deliver personally a secret message to General Douglas MacArthur from the President. After visiting several air and sea bases in Hawaii, Rickenbacker was a passenger in the B-17D Flying Fortress numbered 40-3089, which strayed hundreds of miles off course while on its way to a refueling stop on Canton Island in the Central Pacific Ocean. The B-17 was forced to ditch in a remote and little-traveled part of the Central Pacific.

The failure in navigation has been ascribed to an out-of-adjustment celestial navigation instrument, a bubble octant, that gave a systematic bias to all of its readings. That octant reportedly had suffered a severe shock in a pre-takeoff mishap. This unnecessary ditching spurred on the development of improved navigational instruments and also better survival gear for the aircrewmen. The B-17's pilot-in-command, Captain William T. Cherry, Jr., was forced to ditch his B-17 in the Pacific Ocean, rather close to Japanese-held islands, also. However, the Americans were never spotted by Japanese patrol planes, and they were to drift on the ocean for thousands of miles.

For 24 days, Rickenbacker, Army captain Hans C. Adamson, his friend and business partner, and the rest of the crewmen drifted in life rafts at sea. Rickenbacker was still suffering somewhat from his earlier airplane crash, and Capt. Adamson sustained serious injuries during the ditching. The other crewmen in the B-17 were hurt to varying degrees. The crewmen's food supply ran out after three days. Then, on the eighth day, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker's head. He warily and cautiously captured it, and then the survivors meticulously divided it into equal parts and used part of it for fishing bait.[24] They lived on sporadic rain water that fell and similar food "miracles".

Rickenbacker assumed leadership, encouraging and browbeating the others to keep their spirits up. One crewman, Alexander Kaczmarczyk of the USAAF, died and was buried at sea. The U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy's patrol planes planned to abandon the search for the lost B-17 crewmen after just over two weeks, but Rickenbacker's wife persuaded them to extend it another week. The services agreed to do so. Once again, the newspapers and radio broadcasts reported that Rickenbacker was dead.

A US Navy patrol OS2U-3 Kingfisher float-plane spotted and rescued the survivors on November 13, off the coast of Nukufetau in Tuvalu. All were suffering from exposure, sunburn, dehydration, and near-starvation. Rickenbacker completed his assignment and delivered his message to General MacArthur, which has never been made public. Rickenbacker had thought that he had been lost for 21 days, and wrote a book about this experience titled Seven Came Through, published by Doubleday, Doran. It was not until later that he recalculated the number of days, and he corrected himself in his autobiography in 1967. The pilot of the plane that rescued the survivors, Lieutenant William F. Eadie, USN, was awarded the Navy's Air Medal for his actions during the rescue.

The story was also recounted in Lt. James Whittaker's book We Thought We Heard The Angels Sing, published in 1943.

The story of Rickenbacker's ordeal has been used as an example for Alcoholics Anonymous when the first of their Twelve Traditions was formulated: "Our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends upon AA unity."[25]

#2 quilt-n-golf gal

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Posted 13 July 2012 - 08:18 AM

Thanks for sharing such a great story! Reminds me that we may not know the details behind what a person does, therefore we should not judge them. Great topic...thanks again!

#3 The Average Joe

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Posted 16 July 2012 - 08:16 PM

You tickled my memory with that one. Eddie was a WWI hero. He won 7(!) Distinguished Service Crosses, and a Congressional Medal of Honor. He has an amazing life story, and after refreshing my memory by hitting wiki up, I think I'm going to have to read his autobiography. What a life!

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#4 caligirlz

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Posted 16 July 2012 - 08:57 PM

I found an online version of "We Thought We Heard The Angels Sing" and read it this weekend. It was very good. Too short though. I want to read his autobiography too, was hoping that there was a kindle version, but no. Looks like I will be purchasing the book too.

#5 supermom

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Posted 17 July 2012 - 12:29 PM

This is not a story, but a poem.
And it is under the section motivational, but it is something that has inspired me in my daily endeavors:
http://www.intenseex...nt-be-done.html




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