A Treasury of Miracles for Teens (2 page)

“We need you, God. Give us a miracle.” Erin’s voice mingled with the wind as she once more began to pray.

Out in the water, Tanner knew he had long since run out of energy. His toes and calves cramped with every kick and he was
barely able to keep his eyes open. Something besides the current tugged at him, urging him to drop the boat and let the waves
have their way with him. But every time he began to sink, the salt water stung his lips and eyes and he fought for the surface
once more.

Time blurred as one yard at a time Tanner drew closer to shore. Adrenaline coursed through his body, forcing him forward,
even if only a few inches at a time.

Please
God, he prayed silently.
Help me get these children back to shore.

If he gave in to the fatigue that racked his arms and legs, he and the girls would all drown. Even if they didn’t, the progress
he had made so far would be wiped out in the driving riptide. He pictured his bedroom back home.
I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.
The verse ran through his
mind again and again. He pursed his lips in determination and continued forward.

About that time, Erin heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw her parents running across the beach.

“Where’s Tanner?” her mother shouted from a distance. Her eyes were wide, terrified.

“Is that him out there?” Her father pointed toward Tanner and the girls in the boat.

“Oh, Mom … Dad … I’m so scared.” Erin was in their arms before she had time to explain. “Tanner didn’t want them to drown.”

“I’m going out, too.” Her father took a few steps toward the shore.

“Dad, don’t do it!” Erin shouted. “The current’s too strong.”

“He’s right,” her mother came up alongside him. “Besides, Tanner’s making progress. Don’t go in unless he needs you.”

For several more agonizing minutes, Erin and her parents waited and prayed, huddled a few yards from the crowd of people around
the children’s mother. Gradually, Tanner and the girls moved closer to shore. When they were only ten yards away, Tanner’s
father swam out and pulled the trio safely to the sand.

As the crowd surrounded them and the girls’ mother swooped her daughters into a waiting towel, Tanner’s father lifted him
into his arms and took
him onto the beach, where he set him gently in a chair.

“Thank God, you’re okay!” Tanner’s mother ran alongside them. There were tears of relief in her eyes and in Erin’s as they
gathered around him. Tanner’s hands and legs were swollen and his face was grayish-white. He began to moan.

“Son!” His father wrapped a blanket around him. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

Tanner could barely hear his dad’s voice. He opened his eyes, but everything was blurred. “Water,” he said.

“I’ll get it!”

Tanner thought the voice was Erin’s, but he was too tired to care. He closed his eyes and slept until he felt his mother gently
waking him. She held a bottle of water to his lips. “Here, son. Drink.”

After several sips Tanner sat up straighter and opened his eyes fully. He looked around, past his parents and brother toward
the area where the little girls’ mother had been. The sparse crowd including the girls and their family were already making
their way up the beach.

Tanner blinked and shot a look at his parents and sister. “Were the girls okay?”

“They were fine.” Tanner’s mother ran her hand over his forehead. “They should’ve at least stopped to thank you.”

Tanner shrugged. “Oh, well. They probably
wanted to get the girls indoors. They were pretty scared.” He sank back in the beach chair and closed his eyes again. He was
exhausted, but he had survived the ordeal and he was humbly thankful. God had pulled him through. Only he knew how close he’d
come to giving up and letting his body sink beneath the waves.

Throughout the rest of the week the village people got word of Tanner’s heroic rescue and began treating him like a celebrity.
People pointed to him and talked in whispers, and several times people came up to him and congratulated him on saving the
lives of the young girls.

Tanner learned from several of them that the girls’ father was Peter Schilling, a very wealthy merchant in town. Apparently
he didn’t like Americans and had voiced that to others on more than one occasion. This puzzled Tanner—that the man would put
his dislike of Americans over his daughters’ rescue—but he tried not to think about it. The man had to have known where Tanner’s
family was staying, and yet he made no attempt to contact Tanner or to thank him in any way for saving his daughters’ lives.

Finally the month drew to an end, and the Woods family packed their things and returned home to Southern California. As they
boarded the airplane, Tanner glanced once more toward the airport. He had secretly hoped Mr. Schilling might
choose this time to thank him in person for his rescue. But when he saw no one, he decided to put the incident out of his
mind.

Fifteen years passed and Tanner finished school and college. His younger sister married and had two children, but Tanner became
an attorney and remained single. He dated occasionally, but for one reason or another never wound up in a serious relationship.

“It’s time you find yourself a wife, Brother,” Erin joked once in a while.

But Tanner would only shake his head. He was more serious than his sister and did not easily make close connections with people.
Though girls had always been interested, none of them had captured Tanner’s heart.

The summer he turned thirty, he decided to vacation alone at the same spot in the south of France where his family had stayed
fifteen years earlier. The anniversary of the day he had rescued the little girls was approaching, and for some reason he
felt compelled to spend it on the same beach.

“I don’t know what it is,” he told Erin. “I feel drawn to that place.”

“Something to do with saving those kids?” Erin asked.

Tanner shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just something I can’t get out of my mind. I have to go back there.”

Once there, Tanner stayed at the same hotel and passed the hours thinking about his future. For several days he walked the
beach and swam the surf. He made little conversation with anyone and after nearly a week he felt well-rested and ready to
return to his life.

Sunday arrived—the fifteen-year anniversary of his miraculous rescue. Late that afternoon Tanner walked down the beach and
sat near a tree just up the shore from the spot where the girls had first gotten pulled out to sea. Suddenly he heard someone
coming up beside him. He turned and saw a beautiful young woman. Her hair was pale blond and something about her light-blue
eyes was hauntingly familiar. He waited until she was beside him before nodding to her. “Hi.”

“You’re Tanner Woods,” she said softly.

Tanner’s eyes widened and he stood up, slowly moving toward the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Have we met?”

The woman smiled shyly and looked away. “Not formally.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “My name is Heidi Schilling,
daughter of Peter Schilling.”

Instantly Tanner understood. “You were in the boat … the day I rescued you!”

Heidi nodded. “I was four years old; my sister was seven. We had just set out for a ride in the waves when the current took
us out to sea.”

“And before anyone knew what was happening,” Tanner continued, “you two were in big trouble.”

The young woman was quiet a moment, her blue eyes glistening from the reflection of the surf. “All my life I’ve wanted to
meet you, to thank you for what you did that day. I know you risked your life to save us.”

Tanner couldn’t believe it. How incredible that they’d meet after so many years. “So you’re nineteen?”

Heidi nodded, a smile playing on her lips.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Townspeople talk. It’s a small place and they never stopped telling the story about how Phillip Schilling’s daughters were
rescued by an American. When you returned, several people remembered you. I was hoping to find you here … since this is the
anniversary of that day. When I saw you, and saw that you were American, I took a chance.”

Tanner nodded. Her story made sense. He had told some of the people at the resort who he was, and a few of them who had worked
there that summer fifteen years ago still remembered the incident. There were only five hundred people in the seaside town,
so it was very possible that Heidi would hear about his presence.

Heidi was beautiful, but at that moment, her expression grew sad and distant. “I want to apologize,” Heidi said. “For my father.
He is a very stern man, stuck in his ways. Sometimes I wonder if he
even really cared that you rescued us that day. I know he never thanked you, and all my life I’ve wanted to do something about
that.”

Tanner smiled. “Now you have.”

Strange feelings were beating at Tanner’s heart. Somehow being with this woman made him feel that he’d known her all these
years. She was young, no doubt. Just a teenager. But she seemed a decade older. “Could you have dinner?” he asked her.

She grinned, and a hint of red tinged her cheeks. “I’d love to.”

The two spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the lives they had lived for the past fifteen years. After dinner they
returned to the beach and strolled along the shore, side by side. Tanner learned that Heidi was a very lonely young woman.
Her father had never treated her like his other daughter. He had always accused Heidi’s mother of getting involved with an
American tourist, and he’d decided Heidi was the foreigner’s daughter, not his. It was for that reason he hated all Americans.

“That’s why he never thanked you.” Heidi hung her head for a moment, her hands at her side. “Sometimes I think he wanted me
to die that day.”

“Heidi, that’s awful.” Tanner reached for her fingers and took them loosely in his own.

In the years since, Heidi’s mother had died, and her sister had married and moved away. Tanner felt his heart going out to
the young woman beside him. By the time the evening was finished, Tanner had
the strangest sense that he would someday marry Heidi. He made plans to see her the next day and the next. He stayed long
beyond the time he’d allotted for his vacation. By the time several months had passed, he shared his feelings with her.

“I know you’re young,” he told her, taking her hands in his own. “But marry me. Leave this lonely place and come back with
me to the States.”

Tears filled Heidi’s eyes and she made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Are you serious?”

“As serious as I was that day when I rescued you.”

That evening they shared the news with Heidi’s father. He had no comment other than, “Be gone, then.” He waved her off with
a brush of his hand. “But if you marry the American, don’t bother coming back here ever again.”

Heidi was sad but not surprised by her father’s response. Later that week she and Tanner left for the United States.

Tanner’s family could hardly believe what had happened. Tanner had left for vacation a confirmed bachelor and returned two
weeks later engaged to a beautiful young woman. But when they learned that she was one of the children Tanner had rescued
that summer at the beach, they were stunned. And delighted.

Tanner and Heidi married and in the next few years had a little girl, Amy, who had golden hair and
sea-blue eyes like her mother. People who knew the couple often talked about the love they shared, marveling at the way they
seemed almost a part of each other.

“Don’t you ever fight with each other or have a bad day?” Erin asked Tanner once.

Tanner shook his head. “I was thirty when I met her, but God picked her for me when I was just a teenager,” he said. “I guess
I’m just making up for lost time. I love her and Amy like no one in my life, Erin. Sometimes I think it’s part of what we
prayed for that day on the beach.”

Erin’s voice grew quiet. “I never thought of it that way …”

“I mean, who would’ve thought? All those years ago I was saving that girl to one day be the love of my life. Back then I knew
it was an answer to a prayer that we survived. But now I see it was more than that. It was a miracle, Erin. Nothing short
of a miracle.”

A
t age sixteen, Julie Keller wanted nothing more than for her twin brother, Jared, to live another year. One more Christmas,
one more spring. One more summer when they could stay up late and play cards, teasing each other about the school year ahead.
But that hot August night she found herself in a hospital waiting room begging God for something much more specific.

One more day.

Jared had been born with cystic fibrosis, a debilitating lung disease. It wasn’t a question of whether the illness would take
Jared’s life. It was just a question of when. “If we’re lucky, he’ll live to his mid-twenties,” doctors had told the Keller
family.

And Julie’s parents agreed. They had lived a life separate from faith and their son’s illness only underlined their belief:
“God isn’t real, prayer doesn’t work, and miracles don’t happen,” their father would say on occasion. “It’s that simple.”

But Julie and Jared didn’t agree. When they were thirteen, they’d been invited to a Young Life camp with some friends from
school. There, they gave their lives to God and together they’d found rides to church every week since. As long as Jared was
well enough to attend, anyway. And when he couldn’t she’d stay by his side. They’d talk about church and about school and
all that went on there.

“Keep praying for me, Julie,” Jared would say. “I’ll be back.”

“I won’t stop.” Julie would hide her tears and smile.

“Save a spot at the lunch table, okay?”

“Okay.”

It was a conversation they’d had many times.

In the past month, Jared had seemed to be doing better than ever. He and Julie went to the Young Life camp again, this time
as counselors. Their friendship had never been closer than it was those long days, swimming and taking part in a handful of
activities day after day.