Survivors

When I hear these words I could immediately be transported deep into the jungles of Africa, via a time warp that takes me where it is man against the King of The Jungle. Or I could take a panoramic viewer, which would show me the battle of the gladiator as he engages in a struggle against the most vicious beast ever to live, and watch the blood and gore along with the spectators of those days. Kings and nobles were the key spectators.

There is a sense of survival in the sports game today, as it was in the days of the Roman gladiators. “If I don't get you, you will get me; and that will cost me to much.” You can see it in all the sports: Men and women pushing and shoving trying to be number one.

Wrestling, if you want to call it a sport, is likely one of the greatest offenders. I know it is a put on for entertainment value. Everything is a put on for entertainment, but it represents the mentality of people. With this kind of mentality we are always wary of not being the Survivor. I sense that we are fearful that we might not be the Survivor: We will not get the big prize. Life?.

Today when I look around at the presentation of The Survivor, I see men and women, who tear at each other mentally and emotionally to see who will win the big prize. It just a game, they say. But does anyone of these combatants come away unscathed. This kind of viewing may be what you enjoy. It may be what causes you to take a look at real life as it is visibly portrayed on the television screen. In that setting there is only one Survivor; Winner takes all.

It seems to me that life is much like that out in the everyday world. Oh, not everyone is like that. But it seems that in the pressure to survive the battles of daily life, we sometimes put aside the feelings that others may have, and we look out for number one. Me.

As I embark on each day's adventures I am not usually engaged in the things that the people on the television series Survivor are involved in. If I were so minded and involved to the degree that they are, I don't think that I could survive the day. The challenges are far to great for me to be able to handle the pressure.

Just yesterday I heard a story from someone's personal diary. The lady who did the journaling was on board a ship called the SS Central America. Her name was Adeline Easton. The SS Central America was a steamship that sank in 1857 while battling a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas.

The SS Central America was transporting huge amounts of gold, which had been taken out of the California landscape. The owners of those fortunes were also on board, savoring their fortunes as they steamed back to their homeport somewhere across the water. It would be easy to speculate on the conversations that took place as each one walked around in a state of euphoria at the state of their fortunes. The survival of the getting of the gold had taken place, and now it was time to bask in the sunlight of their fortunes: Or so they thought.

Every newspaper in the East ran articles about the ease of finding gold in California. How-to books, like the Emigrant's Guide to the Gold Mines, described vast riverbeds "paved with gold to the thickness of a hand," and claimed that "twenty to fifty thousand dollars of gold" could be "picked out almost instantly." Lectures on gold mining drew enormous crowds, and the lecturers added their own hyperbole: that miners in California were finding up to four pounds of gold, or a thousand dollars a day, that one man had found thirty-six pounds in one day, that not even a hundred thousand men could exhaust all of the gold in California if they worked hard at it for ten years.

"In a moment, as it were," wrote the editor of the Hartford Daily Courant, "a desert country that never deserved much notice from the world has become the centre of universal attraction. Fifteen millions have already come into the possession of somebody and all creation is going out there to fill their pockets."

But all creation had only two ways to get to the new territory: They could walk or they could sail. Those choosing to walk would have to wait until April, for between them and California stood the Rocky Mountains, and winter in those mountains first killed the grass, and then buried it under feet of snow. Without feed, the pack animals would die.

The impatient ones sailed, but now they had to decide: around Cape Horn or across Panama. The route via Cape Horn was a four- to eight-month journey of thirteen thousand nautical miles that promised the most terrifying storms a landlubber could conjure. In 1833, Charles Darwin described the Horn in his diary: "The sight," he wrote, "is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck." Waves eighty to ninety feet tall, the Horn's infamous "greybeards," swept across the ocean at thirty knots and battered ships already encrusted in ice. Spars snapped, sails shredded, and men washed overboard to freeze and drown in an icy sea.

The route across Panama far exceeded the other two for speed and convenience, and the ways to die were less dramatic. The first leg, New York to Panama, took but nine days with a short layover in Havana. Once the passengers arrived, the journey across the isthmus was more vexing than life threatening. Ahead of them were five days in a dugout canoe, on the back of an unpredictable mule, and atop their own sore feet. The trip exposed them to tropical heat, outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and yellow fever, and coffee sweetened by natives chewing sugar cane and spitting into the cup. Then they arrived in the three-hundred-year-old city of Panama, which one American described as a "dirty, noisy, and unpleasant place to stay in." The sun was too hot, the water too noxious to drink, and the native lemonade too "sloppy" to swallow. Here they waited on the docks until a vessel could ferry them up the west coast to San Francisco.

When the California steamed into the Bay of Panama for a brief layover and to take on more coal, her captain looked out upon the docks and saw mountains of old trunks, dirty bedding, rucksacks, ropes, tents, pots, pans, utensils, spades, and pickaxes. The stories of gold in the far reaches of the Union had incited riots at the steamship offices back east. Already, the first Atlantic steamer had arrived on the Caribbean side of Panama filled with passengers. Two days later a bark arrived carrying another sixty. By the middle of January, five other ships had off-loaded more passengers to begin the trek upriver and over the mountains to Panama City.

The California had room for 200 passengers, but over 500 waited at the docks. The captain ordered lumber, built berths in the ship's open spaces, and left Panama two weeks later with 365 passengers and 36 crew "crammed into the ship and overflowing onto the deck and the housetops." But by then, a total of four steamers, two barks, three brigs, and a schooner had deposited 726 passengers on the opposite shore to make their way to the Pacific side, and more were coming in daily on vessels embarking from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

Use of this excerpt from Ship and Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice:

In this account of a gold rush in California, I see that there was an extreme test of survival involved just to get to the site. I would say that it had to be the survival of the fittest just to get there, let alone any thought of getting the gold back home. I am sure there were stories of people who had harvested the gold and then were divested of the gold they had acquired; by criminal means, as they thought of going home and enjoying their new found wealth.

My deduction would be that there were survivors, and then there were those who did not fare quite so well. The story I wish to relate to, was embedded into the scenario of this Ship of Destiny. The SS Central America would never reach homeport. Surviving would be a challenge for everyone onboard while the hurricane was doing its best to make sure there were no survivors. The hurricane would lose in that quest. Addie and Ansel were survivors along with others. Their story was not that of wealth and greed survival. They told a story of survival that was engulfed in Love. On this Ship of Destiny they were newlyweds.

Let me brief it up for you. We have a young couple that is really in love. All of life is ahead of them, on the basis of having fallen in love and married. They set sail on the SS. Central America in 1857 to begin that life in what was thought to be a pleasure cruise. It ended up being a test of survival.

I believe that in every love story there are those who did not fare so well. I am focusing for the moment on a love story that took place a long time ago. Ruth was the lover. I speak not in the sense with the sense of sexual overtones. I am talking about true love.

Here we have another story of The Survivors. Ruth A True Love Story Elimelech and Naomi had to move on to another place to live because the chances of surviving the famine in their part of the country were not good. They had a couple of sons, so they had already done a bit of living. I am sure that they had already faces many tests of survival in the process.

I have always called this story the greatest love story; next to the love story of God and us. Elimelech and Naomi get settled in at their new home and her husband dies. Now, she and the boys had to brave life alone. They get married and after they have lived at this place about ten years, both her sons die. How is she surviving? Coping might be another way of asking the same question.

Naomi has now lost all the family she brought with her to California: Well it was not California, it was a place called Moab. It was much like California. They had left the dearth of their homeland to make it better in Moab. The trip was not over yet. We are going to witness the use of an ingredient that is necessary in all cases of true survival.

Naomi was now left with two daughters in-law. She was in this place she could never call home. But it was here she had come to make the best of life, because it was here that they had decided the gold lay on the ground. If they came here everything would come out better.

Finally Naomi realized that the gold rush was over and she decided to take the next ship home. Before she could leave she had to see to it that her daughters in-law were able to be re-established into their own families. They certainly could not come with her. It would be too much of a culture shock.

Well, Naomi told they girls that they should go to their family and start as it were: Life again. Find another husband and get on with life. Forget all that had happened and move on. This proposal was accepted by one of the girls, but the other on said: Not A Chance! We got into this situation with you and I am in it to the end. Naomi found her Ship of Destiny. It was the MS. Love. It could have been called the SS. Ruth.

As you read the story for yourself in Ruth { Ruth A True Love Story } you will see all of the things that it took to survive. There was actually only one ingredient that was able to allow for survival: it was Love. God's love poured into the heart of a person who would share that love with another person.

Addie and Ansel Easton shared that kind of love. They boarded the SS. Central America together with an understanding that nothing would separate the two of them. They fought the hurricane for what seemed like eternity. Finally lifeboats had to be used to send women and children to safety.

It was a struggle to part company, but Addie and Ansel would survive to be reunited. It was because of a love that said: “I will never leave you.” Love stories always get to me. They always allow for survival. They never fail. Love never fails. That is the promise of the word of God: The Captain of The MS.Love. (My Saviors Love)

Is it survival of the fittest, or is it survival because of destiny, or is it survival because of the hand of God? The hand of God is involved in your predetermined destiny? Is it the hand of God, which determines your fate(Predetermined without your ability to change it?) or survival based on the choices you make?

Relate to this in Survivors: I heard the story of Addie & Ansel Easton? On It Is Written on Saturday Morning on March 24/ 2001 RE: Gold sinks to the bottom & Faith raises to the top; by Mark Findley the minister on the show.


	Survival Of The Fittest Survival Of The Fittest When I hear these words I could immediately be transported deep into the jungles of Africa, via a time warp that takes me where it is man against the King of The Jungle. Or I could take a panoramic viewer, which would show me the battle of the gladiator as he engages in a struggle against the most vicious beast ever to live, and watch the blood and gore along with the spectators of those days. Kings and nobles were the key spectators. There is a sense of survival in the sports game today, as it was in the days of the Roman gladiators. “If I don't get you, you will get me; and that will cost me to much.” You can see it in all the sports: Men and women pushing and shoving trying to be number one. Wrestling, if you want to call it a sport, is likely one of the greatest offenders. I know it is a put on for entertainment value. Everything is a put on for entertainment, but it represents the mentality of people. With this kind of mentality we are always wary of not being the Survivor. I sense that we are fearful that we might not be the Survivor: We will not get the big prize. Life?. Today when I look around at the presentation of The Survivor, I see men and women, who tear at each other mentally and emotionally to see who will win the big prize. It just a game, they say. But does anyone of these combatants come away unscathed. This kind of viewing may be what you enjoy. It may be what causes you to take a look at real life as it is visibly portrayed on the television screen. In that setting there is only one Survivor; Winner takes all. It seems to me that life is much like that out in the everyday world. Oh, not everyone is like that. But it seems that in the pressure to survive the battles of daily life, we sometimes put aside the feelings that others may have, and we look out for number one. Me. As I embark on each day's adventures I am not usually engaged in the things that the people on the television series Survivor are involved in. If I were so minded and involved to the degree that they are, I don't think that I could survive the day. The challenges are far to great for me to be able to handle the pressure. They feel that it is only a game. I feel that it is a vicious game. Just yesterday I heard a story from someone's personal diary. The lady who did the journaling was on board a ship called the SS Central America. Her name was Adeline Easton. The SS Central America was a steamship that sank in 1857 while battling a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas. The SS Central America was transporting huge amounts of gold, which had been taken out of the California landscape. The owners of those fortunes were also on board, savoring their fortunes as they steamed back to their homeport somewhere across the water. It would be easy to speculate on the conversations that took place as each one walked around in a state of euphoria at the state of their fortunes. The survival of the getting of the gold had taken place, and now it was time to bask in the sunlight of their fortunes: Or so they thought. Let me give you an excerpt from a book describing the toils people had to go through to get to the site of the gold. Excerpt from: Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue by Gary Kinder by Gary Kinder To be continued. The Gold Rush is On Every newspaper in the East ran articles about the ease of finding gold in California. How-to books, like the Emigrant's Guide to the Gold Mines, described vast riverbeds "paved with gold to the thickness of a hand," and claimed that "twenty to fifty thousand dollars of gold" could be "picked out almost instantly." Lectures on gold mining drew enormous crowds, and the lecturers added their own hyperbole: that miners in California were finding up to four pounds of gold, or a thousand dollars a day, that one man had found thirty-six pounds in one day, that not even a hundred thousand men could exhaust all of the gold in California if they worked hard at it for ten years. "In a moment, as it were," wrote the editor of the Hartford Daily Courant, "a desert country that never deserved much notice from the world has become the centre of universal attraction. Fifteen millions have already come into the possession of somebody and all creation is going out there to fill their pockets." But all creation had only two ways to get to the new territory: They could walk or they could sail. Those choosing to walk would have to wait until April, for between them and California stood the Rocky Mountains, and winter in those mountains first killed the grass, and then buried it under feet of snow. Without feed, the pack animals would die. The impatient ones sailed, but now they had to decide: around Cape Horn or across Panama. The route via Cape Horn was a four- to eight-month journey of thirteen thousand nautical miles that promised the most terrifying storms a landlubber could conjure. In 1833, Charles Darwin described the Horn in his diary: "The sight," he wrote, "is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck." Waves eighty to ninety feet tall, the Horn's infamous "greybeards," swept across the ocean at thirty knots and battered ships already encrusted in ice. Spars snapped, sails shredded, and men washed overboard to freeze and drown in an icy sea. The route across Panama far exceeded the other two for speed and convenience, and the ways to die were less dramatic. The first leg, New York to Panama, took but nine days with a short layover in Havana. Once the passengers arrived, the journey across the isthmus was more vexing than life threatening. Ahead of them were five days in a dugout canoe, on the back of an unpredictable mule, and atop their own sore feet. The trip exposed them to tropical heat, outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and yellow fever, and coffee sweetened by natives chewing sugar cane and spitting into the cup. Then they arrived in the three-hundred-year-old city of Panama, which one American described as a "dirty, noisy, and unpleasant place to stay in." The sun was too hot, the water too noxious to drink, and the native lemonade too "sloppy" to swallow. Here they waited on the docks until a vessel could ferry them up the west coast to San Francisco. When the California steamed into the Bay of Panama for a brief layover and to take on more coal, her captain looked out upon the docks and saw mountains of old trunks, dirty bedding, rucksacks, ropes, tents, pots, pans, utensils, spades, and pickaxes. The stories of gold in the far reaches of the Union had incited riots at the steamship offices back east. Already, the first Atlantic steamer had arrived on the Caribbean side of Panama filled with passengers. Two days later a bark arrived carrying another sixty. By the middle of January, five other ships had off-loaded more passengers to begin the trek upriver and over the mountains to Panama City. The California had room for 200 passengers, but over 500 waited at the docks. The captain ordered lumber, built berths in the ship's open spaces, and left Panama two weeks later with 365 passengers and 36 crew "crammed into the ship and overflowing onto the deck and the housetops." But by then, a total of four steamers, two barks, three brigs, and a schooner had deposited 726 passengers on the opposite shore to make their way to the Pacific side, and more were coming in daily on vessels embarking from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans. Use of this excerpt from Ship and Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing, or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: Copyright © 1998 by Gary Kinder. All rights reserved. http://www.randomhouse.com/features/shipofgold/ In this account of a gold rush in California, I see that there was an extreme test of survival involved just to get to the site. I would say that it had to be the survival of the fittest just to get there, let alone any thought of getting the gold back home. I am sure there were stories of people who had harvested the gold and then were divested of the gold they had acquired; by criminal means, as they thought of going home and enjoying their new found wealth. My deduction would be that there were survivors, and then there were those who did not fare quite so well. The story I wish to relate to, was embedded into the scenario of this Ship of Destiny. The SS Central America would never reach homeport. Surviving would be a challenge for everyone onboard while the hurricane was doing its best to make sure there were no survivors. The hurricane would lose in that quest. Addie and Ansel were survivors along with others. Their story was not that of wealth and greed survival. They told a story of survival that was engulfed in Love. On this Ship of Destiny they were newlyweds. Let me brief it up for you. We have a young couple that is really in love. All of life is ahead of them, on the basis of having fallen in love and married. They set sail on the SS. Central America in 1857 to begin that life in what was thought to be a pleasure cruise. It ended up being a test of survival. I believe that in every love story there are those who did not fare so well. I am focusing for the moment on a love story that took place a long time ago. Ruth was the lover. I speak not in the sense with the sense of sexual overtones. I am talking about true love. Here we have another story of The Survivors. Ruth A True Love Story Elimelech and Naomi had to move on to another place to live because the chances of surviving the famine in their part of the country were not good. They had a couple of sons, so they had already done a bit of living. I am sure that they had already faces many tests of survival in the process. I have always called this story the greatest love story; next to the love story of God and us. Elimelech and Naomi get settled in at their new home and her husband dies. Now, she and the boys had to brave life alone. They get married and after they have lived at this place about ten years, both her sons die. How is she surviving? Coping might be another way of asking the same question. Naomi has now lost all the family she brought with her to California: Well it was not California, it was a place called Moab. It was much like California. They had left the dearth of their homeland to make it better in Moab. The trip was not over yet. We are going to witness the use of an ingredient that is necessary in all cases of true survival. Naomi was now left with two daughters in-law. She was in this place she could never call home. But it was here she had come to make the best of life, because it was here that they had decided the gold lay on the ground. If they came here everything would come out better. Finally Naomi realized that the gold rush was over and she decided to take the next ship home. Before she could leave she had to see to it that her daughters in-law were able to be re-established into their own families. They certainly could not come with her. It would be too much of a culture shock. Well, Naomi told they girls that they should go to their family and start as it were: Life again. Find another husband and get on with life. Forget all that had happened and move on. This proposal was accepted by one of the girls, but the other on said: Not A Chance! We got into this situation with you and I am in it to the end. Naomi found her Ship of Destiny. It was the MS. Love. It could have been called the SS. Ruth. As you read the story for yourself in Ruth { Ruth A True Love Story } you will see all of the things that it took to survive. There was actually only one ingredient that was able to allow for survival: it was Love. God's love poured into the heart of a person who would share that love with another person. Addie and Ansel Easton shared that kind of love. They boarded the SS. Central America together with an understanding that nothing would separate the two of them. They fought the hurricane for what seemed like eternity. Finally lifeboats had to be used to send women and children to safety. It was a struggle to part company, but Addie and Ansel would survive to be reunited. It was because of a love that said: “I will never leave you.” Love stories always get to me. They always allow for survival. They never fail. Love never fails. That is the promise of the word of God: The Captain of The MS.Love. (My Saviors Love) To be continued. Part Two Is it survival of the fittest, or is it survival because of destiny, or is it survival because of the hand of God? The hand of God is involved in your predetermined destiny? Is it the hand of God, which determines your fate(Predetermined without your ability to change it?) or survival based on the choices you make? http://www.randomhouse.com/features/shipofgold/ Ship of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder Relate to this in Survivors: I heard the story of Addie & Ansel Easton? On It Is Written on Saturday Morning on March 24/ 2001 RE: Gold sinks to the bottom & Faith raises to the top; by Mark Findley the minister on the show.