Stalking

Last Satuday was the first time Walter Szluc, Jr. had gone kayaking in the ocean. When he and his family arrived at Nauset Beach in Orleans, Mass. in Cape Cod, his daughter refused to enter the water out of fear of sharks. He teased her a bit, assuring her of the very small odds of a shark encounter.

A while later, Szluc was about 200 feet offshore, paddling obliviously in 8 feet of water, when the shark’s dorsal fin emerged and began trailing him at a distance of 10 feet.

Terrified beachgoers fled the water and yelled “Shark, shark” to warn Szluc, who failed to hear them at first. When he finally got the message, Szluc turned around to see what all the excitement was about.  “I saw the fin out of the water. I looked down and saw the body and realized that part of the shark was underneath me… I had a deep swallow… then I just paddled… I figured this is either it, or I’m going to paddle in.”

“You could see the darkness of it,” one witness said. “It was longer than the kayak… it was crazy big.” Observers estimate the shark’s length was between 12 and 14 feet in length.

Imagine the terror of being stalked by a Great White! What a way to get your heart pumping!

This picture of Szluc strikes me as a chilling metaphor of that enemy who is busy stalking each of us. While we’re paddling obliviously along through our days, he is maneuvering into position for our destruction! People around us may see the danger, but some just freeze in fear. Others shout a warning we fail to hear for all the surf of life. So on we go, paddling casually, blissfully ignorant of the lurking monster beneath us.

Friend, my encouragement to you is this:  don’t be fish food today! Be on the alert for your adversary the devil