Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [51]
I somehow surfaced. The water was calmer; I’d made it through the rapids. No idea where my raft was. But there was another raft a few yards away. I might make it . . . but I had a problem.
Due to the incredible underwater force, my elastic-banded athletic shorts and my underwear had been pulled down and were swirling, dangling around my ankles, terrifyingly close to flying off and being lost forever in the Nile River.
Swimming with one arm, I bent down with my other and grabbed hold of my underwear and shorts. I thrashed with my one arm and arrived at the nearby raft, the raft that would pull me to safety and get me the heck out of the Nile.
A guide was at the edge, ready to rescue me.
“Both hands on the rope!” he yelled. “Both hands on the rope!”
I grabbed the rope on the side of the boat with one hand, since my other hand was busy holding onto my underwear to prevent it from swirling down the river, never to be recovered.
The guide yelled down at me. “Both hands on the rope!” he bellowed.
“I can’t!” I yelled back to him.
Clearly the guide was mad that I wasn’t following his stern instructions. Or maybe he thought he couldn’t pull me in if I just held the rope with one hand.
“Both hands on the rope!” he yelled. “Now! ”
In a split second I had to decide which was worse, having the guide continue to yell at me in front of everyone, or being pulled into the boat with my underwear and shorts around my ankles.
Then, wincing, I spread my legs apart so my shorts and underwear wouldn’t wash down the Nile, and put both hands on the rope on the side of the raft, though I forgot to properly cross them like we had been taught earlier.
The guide, completely put out with me, grabbed my wrists and pulled me in the raft in one fell swoop. I flopped up and over the edge of the raft, landing completely face-planted on the bottom of the raft, my bare bottom up in the air, draped over the rounded, inflatable side of the boat.
What I didn’t know was that Caleb had already been pulled into this particular raft. I also had no idea just whose boat I had floundered into.
I just lay there for a minute. Silence from all the people on the raft.
“Please, God,” I prayed, “don’t let this be that boat full of the nice American missions team that was singing ‘Dive’ and waving to Steven!”
God heard my prayer . . . though the first face I saw when I finished flipping and flopping around like a landed fish was Caleb. He was just sitting there . . . staring . . . jaw dropped . . . looking at me . . . but trying not to.
I wriggled around, trying to pull up my soggy underwear and shorts to cover up, well, the bottom half of my body. Then I looked around. It was the raft full of tourists from England.
“Well,” I heard a chipper British accent proclaim, “I suppose if you’ve seen one bum, you’ve seen ’em all!”
20
Cinderellas Everywhere
She spins and she sways
To whatever song plays
Without a care in the world
And I’m sitting here wearing
The weight of the world on my shoulders
It’s been a long day
And there’s still work to do
She’s pulling at me saying, “Dad, I need you
There’s a ball at the castle and I’ve
been invited And I need to practice my dancing
Oh please, Daddy, please”
So I will dance with Cinderella
While she is here in my arms
’Cause I know something the prince never knew
Oh I will dance with Cinderella
I don’t want to miss even one song
’Cause all too soon the clock will strike midnight
but I know the truth is the dance will go on.
“Cinderella”
Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman
Our life at home in Franklin, Tennessee, was as wild as rafting on the Nile, though in different ways. I felt like I had blinked and all of the sudden I had six children. Emily was twenty-one years old, Will and Caleb were in high school, Shaoey was in first grade, and our two littlest ones – only seven months apart – were both three.
Steven was doing concert stretches for three or four days, then he’d be home for a while. It was nonstop commotion