City on a Sea, short story #4

Submission

 

“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.”  Ephesians 5:22

 

I live on a boat.

Patricia Carlson Billings glanced back at Hong Kong’s receding skyline, the baby in her arms squirming, her three-year-old son Jonathan retching at her feet despite an adult-dose scopamine patch. Her other three children danced dangerously on the bow rails, laughing, pointing, throwing bits of lunch at the gulls. She hated their excitement, suppressed an urge to ruin it. She thought of Lot’s wife, turned to salt because she looked back while fleeing out of Sodom. The image froze Patricia in a pool of vomit even as Pertexpat drove forward through the South China Sea.

I live on a boat.

The irony of her husband’s new calling was not lost on Patricia Billings. Her teen ritual had repeated itself like only a summer routine could: while everyone else had gone yachting, Patricia and Rebecca had become sisters back at the country club. Best friends forever. Best friends forever on land.

Patricia had long contemplated the saying, “Waiting for the other shoe to drop.” The dictum puzzled her because, truth be told, no shoe had ever dropped. Daughter of a billionaire, married to the son of a billionaire. What hardships had she really experienced?

The question concerned her because the Bible promised genuine Christians a life of suffering. Yet she had borne no crosses. No trials had come her way – no trials, at least, that had come because she was a believer. And so the doubts gnawed: Am I for real? Or am I the prototypical camel, destined never to fit through the eye of the needle?

Boats, shoes, camels. Avoiding the ocean had brought her and Sean together. Now his City on a Sea was forcing her to live on the water. Not an excursion. Not a voyage. A life. Sean knew how much she detested the sea. He didn’t care. Nowhere else on earth to build a new nation. She would have to adjust.

Both shoes dropping. Trial by water. All those God justified and adopted, he also sanctified. Such fine theology she had! But to put it into practice, to submit to her husband’s will, to please him. 

She watched the bow slice through the waves, inhaled the green brine, shuddered despite the heat. God, I hate boats.

***

“I present two propositions,” Patricia informed the first meeting of the Bethel Wives Society. “One: We are the key to Bethel’s long-term success. Two: Submission is more than obedience.”

Patricia gave her audience time to process these assertions. Twelve Chinese, ten Filipino, eight Korean, and seven American wives clustered in Pertexpat’s cafeteria. All possessed at least a little English, although Patricia knew this particular conversation would go beyond the language abilities of many present. She would have to follow up with those women later. That didn’t matter for now, though. What mattered in this first meeting were the women who could speak English, especially the Americans and the Chinese. Get them on board and the others would follow.

“We have all obeyed our husbands in coming to live on Pertexpat, in bringing our children to live on Pertexpat,” Patricia granted. “So we are obedient wives. That does not make us submissive wives. And Bethel will only succeed if we submit.

“I’m talking about our children, of course. Our husbands have this grand vision for starting a new country. Maybe a few of you are true believers as well. But to be honest, most of us at this point are simply along for the ride.

“Our children aren’t stupid. They can sense this division between their parents, this lack of a common zeal or focus. It will affect them. More to the point, it will ruin them. They will not follow their fathers in wanting to create a City on a Sea, not if we are hesitant and hold back. And the children must grow up like their fathers, or this project will die after a generation.

“Understand, then, what I am trying to say. Our obedience secures Bethel’s short-term success. But for Bethel to develop into a true independent nation, one in which the children build  on their parents’ beginnings, that will require our submission.”

“But we have obeyed our husbands,” an American named Kelsey protested. “We’re here, aren’t we? I came with my husband, endured the scorn of family and friends for his sake. I’ve kept my complaints to myself. I gave up my kitchen back home for this cafeteria, and I’ve done  it without whining. How is that not submission?”

“You have obeyed,” Patricia replied, nodding, “and obeyed well as we have all seen and heard. God is glorified through such obedience, and I am sure your husband is grateful. But our men need more than us grinning and bearing this life. They need us to own it, to come to feel aboutBethel as they do.”

“That’s not fair,” their doctor, Sue Yu, said. “We can’t make ourselves feel what our men feel.”

“Have we tried?” Patricia challenged. “I haven’t, certainly. I’ve spent my first week on this ship doing nothing but moping and doing my best not to show it. We can’t control our feelings, it is true, but does that mean we are powerless to affect our feelings? What if we were to act like we shared our husband’s vision? Over time, if we cultivated the interest hard enough, might it not wear off on us? Might it not become ours? We have to try. For Bethel, for our husbands, for the Lord Jesus, we have to try.”

Another American, Cindy Johnson if Patricia remembered correctly, spoke up. “I can’t imagine ever wanting this,” she objected, waving at the walls. “It’s so not what I signed up for.”

“But imagine,” Patricia responded, “imagine doing something that changed you, that made you want it. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Wouldn’t that please your husband?”

“How?” Mae Quan asked. “How we ‘own’ it, like you say? How our children own it?”

“That’s what  I want us to brainstorm,” Patricia said. “How can we invest in Bethel? What can we do to make it succeed?”

“An all-metal environment is so impractical for raising children,” a Filipino woman offered. “It makes every routine injury three times worse.”

“So a rubber coating of some sort,” Patricia suggested, “for the floors and the walls.”

“That’s a lot of rubber,” a voice commented.

“We have a lot of children,” Patricia concluded.

Another woman piped in. “I can’t swim,” she admitted. “I’m so afraid of going overboard, or of my children going overboard.”

“Swimming lessons for everyone, then, every time we’re in port,” Patricia said. “And we need to design a standard uniform of some sort, one with flotation material built into it. That way everyone is always wearing a life vest. A GPS chip, too, so it’s easy to locate a person who does go overboard.”

“The material should be brightly colored,” someone offered.

“Great,” another complained, “there goes all our fashion sense.”

“We are creating a new fashion,” Patricia explained. “Bethel fashion.”

“Long hair is dangerous in such an enclosed environment,” Mrs. Quan said.

Patricia felt her ponytail, nodded. “Yes, short hair will have to be standard.”

“I thought I’d learn how to sail,” a woman confessed. “But this ship has nothing to do with sailing.”

“We can replace a couple of the lifeboats with sailing skiffs,” Patricia suggested. “We can do sailing lessons, too. Anything to make the ocean feel like home.”

“Better recipes,” a woman pleaded. “Compact Day was only five weeks ago and I’m already sick of fish paste.”

“I’ll lead that project,” a petite American named Susanne offered. “I went to chef’s school for a year.”

“Excellent,” Patricia replied.

“No private space,” a Korean woman pleaded.

“Yes, we need prayer closets,” another Korean affirmed. “Soundproof. And a nursery.”

These suggestions made Patricia suddenly self-conscious. Of course they needed private places to pray. Why hadn’t she thought of it? Because she had always had two nannies to watch her children, giving her plenty of opportunity to pray alone in their San Francisco mansion’s sun-room. I’m just a rich dumb blonde, she thought, forced to play First Lady. Who am I kidding? But this was the role Providence had thrust upon her.

“I’ll talk to Sean about it first chance I get,” Patricia promised.

The ideas began pouring forth. Patricia typed furiously on her iPad.

“A rite of passage into adulthood. Something involving the ocean.”

“Water births. If the ocean is to be their home, they should start life in water.”

“They should learn to swim before they learn to walk.”

“Emphases upon marine biology and meteorology in the upper grades.”

“A university specializing in ocean sciences and industries.”

“Your husband is right about the work. Boys should start early, learn to do all the jobs aboard ship.”

“We should have a specific sister-church in each port. No church-hopping.”

“That standard uniform should function like a wet-suit when wet, but be comfortable when dry.”

“Does such a material exist?”

“We’ll have to invent it.”

“Container shipping alone can’t supportBethel’s economy. Neither can fishing.”

“We just began construction of the first factory ship.”

“Families will have to rotate amongst ships periodically to make sure children learn all the different jobs.”

“What about elderly people? Are we going to have a nursing home ship?”

“No nursing homes!” several women shouted at once. “We’ve already started raising our children together. We’ll care for our disabled together, too.”

Of all these ideas, one phrase especially stuck in Patricia’s head: if the ocean is to be their home. If the ocean is to be their home. How could they make the ocean feel like home? For their children? For themselves? Could the sea become home? Could it come to feel like Connecticuthad when she was a child? She tried to imagine her children feeling as uncomfortable on land as she now felt on this rocking cargo vessel. Lord Jesus, make it happen.

***

Pertexpat slipped out of the Magellan dry-dock six months later, the first ship to undergo what had become known as the “First Lady Refit.” Equipped with four prayer rooms, two sailboats, a nursery and day-care center, and fully rubberized surfaces in all the living spaces, Pertexpat had begun the transformation from cargo ship to village.

But what excited Patricia most was the Sea Room. She waited until Pertexpat began making good speed forTaiwan, then led the ship’s wives down into the bow. The group crowded into a brightly lit room with a slanted floor that narrowed forward.

“We are completely below the water line,” Patricia explained excitedly. “Now watch.” She went to a panel on the wall, keyed in her security code, and commanded the room to fill. Filtered baffles on either side of the bulkhead opened slightly, allowing ocean water to rush into the room. Patricia permitted the new pool to fill until the women were forced to cram into the shrinking dry space by the entrance. Then she shut off the valves and walked down the ramp into the water.

“It’s slanted to allow for all ages,” Patricia explained, continuing to stride through the water till her wet suit took over and floated her off the bottom. “The little ones can learn to swim in the shallows. The older ones can learn to spearfish out here. The filters should keep predators out. For the most part.”

Patricia tried to swim back toward her audience. “The children can’t really wear the flotation suits in here. Not while learning to swim, anyway. If we’re in a cold part of the Pacific they’ll have to wear regular ones.”

She got to where she could stand up again and returned to her audience. “With this Sea Room our children can grow up in the sea. The water can be replaced at will as long as the ship is in motion. This will keep it fresh and interesting, as new life forms will enter each time the volume is turned over. Spend enough time in here with your baby, and he really will learn how to swim before learning how to walk. Ocean water will become his natural environment.”

Patricia smiled triumphantly as she watched some of the women begin wading into the pool. She considered the battle fought with Sean to get the Sea Room approved. “Ballast,” he had finally said. “At least it can be emptied at need.” The weight of water in the Sea Room meant the ship could carry one less container: a significant economic disadvantage. But Sean was nothing if not visionary. He could see the outcome if the children spent significant time in water.

But I don’t like water, Patricia reflected silently. Salt clung to her skin, making her sticky. And how could she ever get used to this suit?. She watched several fish dart about the pool, looking for an escape. Am I really going to raise my children in an aquarium? But the Scripture came to her afresh: Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Patricia ran her fingers through her cropped hair, took a breath, and dived back in.

***

“Why did that boy turn off his cell phone?” Patricia grumbled as she hauled her five-year-old daughter Rebecca through the Coral Sea’s deep passageways. The double-keeled factory ship was a real monster, nothing like the quaint little Pertexpat upon which they had first lived. It made searching for a child a real chore if he muted his com. Which Jonathan, apparently, had.

Patricia finally reached the entrance to the starboard factory and requested the foreman track down Jonathan. A few minutes later her son appeared, covered in dirt and grease, a big smile pasted across his face.

“I made my first goo-gun,” he announced triumphantly.

“Congratulations,” Patricia allowed, momentarily distracted. Coral Sea specialized in the manufacture of non-lethal weaponry, a product line for which the fallen world exercised insatiable demand. She hated to burst his bubble, but family reality intruded.

“Listen,” Patricia explained. “Most of the women are ashore, and I’m teaching ESL to the rest. I need you to watch Rebecca for me. The sailboats are already out, so you’ll have to take her to the Sea Room.”

Jonathan’s face sank for a moment, but he quickly recovered and submitted to Patricia’s decree. Clocking out of work, he led the way back toward the vessel’s forward section. Patricia considered Jonathan proudly as he carried Becky carefully through the non-rubberized passages near the factory. Such perfect sea legs. Patricia remembered their family’s first weeks inBethel, how Jonathan had required continual heavy doses of sea-sickness medication. Now he treated heavy seas like a game.

“If I can keep making guns,” Jonathan declared, “I can have a tetron saved by the time I’m thirteen.”

“Then you are almost a man,” Patricia pronounced, pleased that their son had become such a hard worker.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” Jonathan informed her. “It seems to some of us that earning a tetron is a bit, well, anti-climactic. So is the black belt. We were thinking there should be something more distinctly Thelan about coming-of-age.”

Patricia sighed inwardly, having no choice but to agree with her son. The idea of having a rite of passage sounded great in theory, but a decent practice had eluded them. They had settled on a child earning a black belt in a martial art and saving a tetron’s worth of money. Jonathan was right, however. These indicators lacked a distinctly Thelan flavor. There was nothing “oceany” about them.

“I’m not against learning how to fight,” Jonathan clarified as they made it to their quarters. “And I’m glad to save money. My friends and I just think there should be something more. Once a person has secured his first tetron.”

“You have any ideas?” she asked.

“I have one. Paul spent a day and a night on the open sea. I was thinking a person wishing for adult status should be required to spend a day and a night alone in a sailboat. Just him and the ocean.”

“That’s risky.”

“That’s the point.”

Patricia considered her son’s suggestion. A thirteen or fourteen year old child alone at sea. Would Thelan parents balk at such a ritual? Yet their children weren’t like them. They were growing up on water and in water. They weren’t normal humans. They were…what? Water people? No, not the right phrase. Sea People. Some time alone on the ocean would probably be nothing but a vacation.

“I’ll suggest it to your father,” Patricia concluded.

***

Economically inefficient, Patricia groaned from a seat in the galley as Storm Chaser fought the hurricane into which she had deliberately plowed. The First Lady knew intellectually that the triple-hulled vessel ought to be rocking much more than it was: a benefit of cutting through the waves rather than going over them. But a typhoon was still a typhoon. What had she been thinking when she had agreed to her children’s pleas to spend time aboard this ship?

Storm Chaser wielded super-strong wind turbines on her deck, enough to generate massive amounts of electricity if the wind speed were high enough. And what did her crazed children do with all those kilowatts? They engaged in the electrolysis of sea water. To what end? Certainly they manufactured plenty of hydrogen and oxygen, useful gases for sure. But their real goal was capturing the rare metals dissolved in the ocean. Evaporate enough sea water, get rid of the common salts, and you had a cornucopia of precious metals.

But such a foolish way to earn a tetron’s worth of gold! It would make so much more sense to work a job and get paid in gold. Patricia had begged Becky to take a position aboard the Wall Street, the financial ship stationed offLos Angeles. Thelan Accounting Services was making a killing thanks to their low overhead. They also only had to pay 9% of their profits in taxes to theBethel government. NoU.S. company could compete against that, not when they were paying four times as much in taxes plus dealing with the dollar’s relentless inflation.

If Rebecca had gotten a clerk’s job on Wall Street she could have earned five tetrons by now. Mining the ocean for gold! It just made no sense. And surely Sean of all people should have seen it, should have talked sense into their kids before they spent so much effort on such relatively unproductive work. But Sean had been nothing but enthusiastic for the project. Perhaps there was something irresistibly Thelan about mining the sea, something that Sean just couldn’t resist.

Whatever his reason, it left Patricia and a handful of other women to attempt the preparation of a meal while trying not to vomit. How could she get seasick after all these years? Yet none of the vessels on which she had lived had ever deliberately plowed into a cyclone. Such madness!

She grabbed the Thelan cookbook from the shelf in the galley, gazed at the pallor of the five other women with her. 212 recipes for fish paste. Were any designed to stay in the stomach in the midst of such weather? If only they could cook plain fish for once. Just once. But the coal-burning power plants inChinaand the rest ofAsiarendered Pacific seafood too high in heavy metals.Bethelhad the means to process out the metals. But that turned fish into fish paste, their staple and their bane.

“We have to cook,” Patricia implored. A ravenous work shift would be coming down soon. But the six of them remained rooted to their seats in the galley, trying desperately to come to terms with the Storm Chaser’s roll.

“Sixteen years I’ve put up with this,” Cindy Johnson complained. “I want to go back toTexas. I’m going back toTexas.”

It took Patricia a moment to realize the significance of Cindy’s words. “Perhaps this isn’t the best time to make major decisions,” she suggested.

“The decision’s already been made. I can’t take it anymore. You’re all crazy, don’t you see it? Living on a boat. Likely dying on one, if this storm keeps up. Why live in this little tiny space when there is so much land just there for the taking? So much open space. So dry. Steak and sweet tea. I tell you, I’ve had it.”

Patricia tried to think of something useful to say. Yet wasn’t Cindy simply expressing her own heart? She had tried to submit to Sean in every way she could imagine. She sailed, she evangelized in port, she spent so much time in water that she and her children could give swimming lessons to dolphins. She had pressed the vision upon their seven children in every way she knew how.

Yet what had it amounted to? Patricia still hated the sea. She hated the smell of the ships, the reek of every harbor, the never-ending labor of  learning Cantonese and Filipino and Korean. She hated never being still, hated that she had developed such good sea legs, hated salt. For all her efforts to fit in, to own Sean’s vision, the simple fact remained: she wanted to move back toSan Francisco. Oh, to have their old mansion again! To be normal, to be American, to live on land.

A group of teenagers suddenly poured into the galley, looking for their midday meal. They were laughing and joking, carrying on like any other group of teens. But these had just been working a typhoon! The weather didn’t  make them sick. It didn’t even make them nervous. Just a sport to them, producing kilowatts and driving the distilleries. Patricia shook her head. Sea People.

The children realized there was no food to be had. They gave their mothers a quick examination, understood without asking, then went unperturbed into the galley and began preparing their own lunch.

Patricia watched them labor away in their bright orange wet suits, Thelan flag over the left breast. So happy. So content. They weren’t like American children, these youth. Hardy. Hard-working. Fearless.

Didn’t that mean she had succeeded, at least to some extent? She had submitted to Sean well  enough to create children that were like him. Or, if truth be told, children that surpassed him. These children could not drive cars or play football. They inspected the video game consoles shipped across the ocean, but did not know how to operate them. Yet they were adults by the age of fourteen. They possessed multiple skills learned on-the-job: weapons manufacture, fishing, joining, office work. Unparalleled swimmers and divers and sailors, they would win gold medals in the Olympics if Thelans were allowed to participate.

I have succeeded, Patricia thought. Yet she was not one of them. They are Sea People. I am…what? Just a homesick landlubber, longing to return toCalifornia. All these years and Sean’s vision still wasn’t hers. She had obeyed, she concluded. But she still hadn’t submitted.

***

The largest ever gathering of Thelan ships – 78 vessels – held station in a rough semi-circle aboutBethel’s first satellite launch pad. Safe distance was relatively close, less than six kilometers, for the rocket burned simple kerosene rather than a more energy-dense propellant. Simplicity and safety were to be the Thelan space program’s hallmarks, as Sean never tired of repeating.

The rocket on the pad bore a distinctly Thelan look. Crafted entirely of composites, with both first and second stages bearing wings intended to fly them down for soft splash and recovery: the world’s first completely reusable rocket. Of course they’d had to break about 4000 of the world’s patent laws to make it happen, but Bethel didn’t care about patents. It cared only about profits. Specifically, that patent-holders get a share of any profits generated.

Patricia wondered how much money people would actually see. Space launch was a marginal business at best. The cost-per-kilo to orbit was simply too great. But the Trident III launch system would try to halve the current cost. Composites made the rocket lighter and stronger. Reusable stages reduced production costs. Sea launch from a non-stationary platform allowed whatever orbit the customer desired. Kerosene was cheap and relatively safe to work with, at least compared to hydrazine. The electrolysis vessels kept them in plentiful supply of liquid oxygen. Maybe it would all prove to be enough, and the launch company would eventually achieve profitability.

Profits or no, today marked Bethel’s first foray into the “other half of its flag.” The Thelan flag showed blue in the bottom half, representing the ocean, black in the top half, representing space, with a white Jerusalem cross placed in the middle to represent the spread of Christian civilization into the ocean and into space.

But so far Bethel had been all ocean. They were Sea People, not Space People. Today’s attempt at placing a weather satellite over the Pacific would at least represent a token move into the black part of the Thelan flag. Thus the massive gathering of vessels, each flying the Thelan flag that they hoped to turn from vision into reality.

Space, Patricia mused. It was hard enough living on the sea. She tried to imagine how cramped a spaceship would be, how much harder than living on a sailboat alone at sea. For that had been the unexpected fruit of her son Jonathan’s idea: all Thelan citizens had to spend a day and a night on the open sea once a year in order to retain full citizenship rights. The elderly or infirm could hold emeritus status, permitted to speak in town hall meetings. But citizens who refused the day and night at sea lost the right to vote.

And so Patricia had spent time alone at sea. It had done her no good, of course. Meaning it had not made her fall in love with the sea. She still hated boats, and water, and salt. She figured she would hate space even more.

She looked at the flag whipping from the Capitol’s main mast. Blue and Black. No green. No brown. No place for Patricia. Nowhere she could really call home. A foreigner in her own country.

The sea isn’t really blue, she pouted. The sea is grey and opaque and deep and dangerous. They had chosen blue for the flag because in the human imagination, water was blue. She was surrounded by blue. She was drowning in blue. Why oh why had Sean done this to her? Eighteen years at sea. Would it never end? Would she never come to accept it? To like it? To love it? Her seven children had all become Sea People. They were strangers to her now. What would it take for her to become Sea People, too?

A countdown sounded, the rocket arced into the sky, Patricia dutifully cheered and clapped (she was First Lady, after all). When the spacecraft was lost to sight, she turned to head to the Sea Room. God, she prayed, help me! I hate it all.

***

“It’s not working out,” Patricia informed her husband a week before her day and night was due. “Eighteen years, Sean, and still I don’t feel what you feel. Our children are Thelans, real Sea People. I’m not one of them and they know it.” I’m not like you and you know it, she added silently.

“I have never understood your theology in this matter,” Sean confessed as he sat up next to his wife in bed. “As far as I’m concerned, obedience is submission. And you have submitted marvelously. The women in the fleet have taken their lead from you. They have done everything in their power to adapt to life at sea. You don’t realize how much credit you deserve.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Patricia insisted. “You and the kids feel the vision. I need to feel it, too. So I’ve made a decision. When I go out for my day and night, I’m not coming back until I feel it.”

“You’re leaving us?” Sean asked, stunned.

“I’m going on a quest,” the First Lady clarified. “I will return as one of you, or I won’t return at all.”

“Be serious, Patricia. We need you here.”

“The moms on Capitol have already agreed to take care of Rachel and Becky. And you’ll have Jonathan to help, too.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Sean pressed. “Think of all the things that could go wrong.”

“I’ve taught a whole generation how to sail. I think I can handle myself for a few weeks.” Or months. Or years. However long it took.

“You don’t need to do this,” Sean urged. “Besides, it is not just the children that need you. I need you.”

“What you need,” Patricia clarified, “is a submissive wife.”

Patricia would not be dissuaded from her plan. Thus a week later her family gathered on the Capitol to see her off. She was grateful that the day and night ritual gave her an excuse for the start of her voyage. It kept the reporters and busybodies away. Just a Thelan citizen performing her annual duty.

She had outfitted her 8-meter sailboat Living Waters with enough supplies to last three months. She didn’t really think that would be enough, but then that was the point. Patricia and the Pacific Ocean were going to get up close and personal with each other. She kissed her husband and seven children goodbye, let the ship’s crane lower her and the Living Waters into the sea, then set a heading roughly opposite that of the Capitol. Within minutes she had the ocean to herself.

Patricia’s GPS showed her current position to be 730 nautical kilometers north-northwest ofTahiti. She used her satellite connection to call up the American and Thelan internets. This gave her weather patterns and the location of all Bethel shipping. Her general goal was to avoid major storms and company of any kind. She thought she could do both as long as her solar sail cloth kept recharging her boat’s batteries. That way she could get good work out of the propeller when the wind refused to cooperate.

Beyond that her plan was to sit at sea and wait for a miracle. And sit is what she did, at least when the Thelan flag on her mast top sat limp. When the wind picked up, Patricia spread her sails and went with the direction Providence blew her. She kept her fishing lines out and ate whatever she caught, sometimes raw, sometimes fried. The heavy metals she figured she could handle now that she was past the age of childbearing.

She emailed Sean just often enough to keep him from sending a search and rescue flying boat after her. No doubt he kept track of her on GPS, even as she could follow the progress of the Capitol. Sean kept his distance, for which she was grateful. Yet it couldn’t be coincidence that one Thelan ship or another was always within rescue range of the Living Waters. In fairness to Sean, though, there were so many Thelan ships covering the Pacific that it was impossible to get truly out of range of all of them.

Unless she were to head into the Southern Ocean, a suicidal course. But Patricia didn’t have a death wish. She had an ocean wish. She wanted to fall in love with the ocean and all things oceany. She wanted to share her husband’s vision. She wanted to submit.

And so she cruised about the Pacific, weeks gradually turning into months. When her mainsail tore she sewed it. When her reverse osmosis system broke she repaired it. In calm waters she went swimming. In rough weather she tied herself to the Living Waters and prayed to live till dawn. Always, day after day, she waited for her miracle.

Sean emailed but the children did not. Likely they understood her mission better than Sean did himself. He may have been the Founder of Bethel, but the generational gap still applied to him. He had been born on land. He had lived too much life on land. He was not true Sea People.

Patricia’s food gave out after five months, forcing her to live entirely off her daily catch. She trolled a net and caught a shark, which she ripped apart with a knife like her children had taught her. When her last bottle of sunscreen was used up she took to wearing a wide-brimmed hat secured with a chinstrap. For Sean’s sake she replaced the GPS chip in her wetsuit when its battery died. On a windless day she strapped on scuba gear and scraped her sailboat’s hull.

She prayed a fair bit each day, more than she had feared she would although less than she had hoped. There was nothing to do and yet there was everything to do: living alone at sea was hard work. It occurred to her that she had never mined gold like her children had. She improvised a tiny distillation system and began extracting rare minerals from the ocean. This used up a lot of her daily electricity, but she had become increasingly content to depend on her sails.

At seven months Sean’s emails became more desperate. Patricia was forced to start talking to him on the satellite phone, reassuring him that she was not going crazy. She hadn’t gone crazy, had she? Ironically, some women would likely interpret her absence as a supreme act of unsubmissiveness. Indeed, who could really understand her quest except those raised in Bethel? The generational gap applied to more people than just Sean and herself. That’s what she was really trying to do, she realized. She was trying to force herself into another generation, to become Sea People although she had not grown up Sea People. And how could a 47-year-old woman ever really join the generation of her children? It was unnatural.

But the unnatural was what Patricia sought. She pursued a miracle, after all, a change in the very nature of her heart. She wanted new loves and new hates, a second rebirth if she dared call it as much. Would God grant the desired blessing it if Patricia refused to let go until he did? Or would she die out on this ocean, hating it to the end?

Her schedule increasingly reversed, such that she came to sleep during the day and lay awake at night. Partially this was to provide some protection from the sun. Mostly it was so she could study the stars. On clear evenings the absence of ambient light created a star-gazing spectacle that grew in wonder the longer Patricia studied it. Binoculars weren’t much use with the Living Water’s constant motion, so she contented herself primarily with naked-eye viewing. Some nights she would watch from dusk to dawn, beholding the glory of each zodiac constellation moving through the zenith.

One night as she lay studying the loose clusters in Cancer, the flag on the mast top whipped out and blocked her view. She made to move and then paused, an insight striking her: the Thelan flag was incomplete. The top half, in particular, was a plain black field representing outer space. But space wasn’t black! Jewels inhabited the sky like fish filled the sea. Shouldn’t there be stars on the flag, or even constellations?

Why even have the black field, though? Thelans lived in the bottom half of  the flag, the blue half. Granted, Bethel had launched a handful of its own satellites, and many more for paying customers. But no Thelan lived in space. They weren’t space people. They were Sea People.

Why had Sean bothered putting black on the flag? Why not simply make it all blue? That was when Patricia noticed, as if for the first time, that the Thelan flag contained a third color: the white Jerusalem cross placed exactly in the center. And in seeing that cross, for the first time really seeing it, Patricia suddenly got it.

Bethel isn’t about the ocean. At least, it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be about Christ. A Christian civilization, not a water civilization. Hadn’t Sean said as much a hundred times? A thousand times? But Patricia had never heard him. She had never gotten it. The vision Sean wanted her to own wasn’t the blue part of the flag, it was the white. Christ was to be central, and who cared where they lived?

Patricia looked back over the last 18 years with a new-found horror. She had labored with all her might to fall in love with the sea. She had labored with all her might to help every Thelan fall in love with the sea. And she had succeeded! Against all odds and possibility, new culture had been formed. But it wasn’t Christ that made Thelans most distinctive. It was the sea. They weren’t Christian People. They were Sea People.

The folly of her quest crashed upon Patricia like a cyclone. She had chased the blue part ofBethel’s flag, thinking that thereby she was submitting to her husband. But all along Sean had wanted her pursuing the white. They had been working at cross-purposes, ironically, and she had never seen it. Had never suspected it.

But what to do about it? Their culture was out of balance: lots of blue, some white, almost no black. She had led the way in creating that imbalance. If she went back now and tried to change Bethel’s direction, would anyone listen to her? The cultural inertia that already existed was so great. What could be done to stop it? How could their children be convinced that they should not be Sea People? Was such convincing even possible?

Out of balance, out of balance. How to get the focus where it should be? How to correct a disparity that she herself had helped create, that she was actually perpetuating by this very journey at sea?

Patricia studied her GPS and set a new course. For the first time she had a clear destination in mind, such that the limitations of the wind now frustrated her. She abandoned her distillation project and pumped every volt into the drive shaft. Thankfully the Thelan ship for which she headed was currently stationary, located on the equator about 1500 nautical kilometers southwest of Hawaii.

After ten days frantic sailing Patricia arrived at Bethel’s floating launch pad. A rocket stood in the center, waiting for its window. Patricia secured the Living Waters to the side of the pad, was unsurprised to find Sean waiting for her at the top of the ladder.

She gave her husband a long hug, then led him into the rocket’s danger zone, indeed right up to one of the nozzles at its base. She reached out her hand and stroked the cone, soon to be filled with a blaze of kerosene and liquid oxygen.

“Did you find what you were seeking?” Sean finally asked.

“Yes,” Patricia replied. “I want to be an astronaut.”