Dear Reader:
Today’s message in a bottle is all about the mystery of love and how love opens our eyes to what is most important. Enjoy!
“To Someone Beautiful and Far Away…” That’s how Swedish sailor Ake Viking started his message. Bored at sea one day in 1955, Ake penned a letter to a potential love interest, hoping the waves would take care of the rest. He asked whoever found it to “write to me, whoever you are.” He included his mailing address in Sweden. Then he slid the letter into a bottle and threw it over the side.
Two years later, Ake returned home from another voyage to find a surprise in the mail. A letter from Paolina, a 17-year-old Italian girl in Syracuse, Sicily. She’d found Ake’s message in a bottle and taken it to a parish priest to translate. “Last Tuesday, I found a bottle on the shore,” Paolina wrote in her reply, which one of Ake’s shipmates translated. “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer….” Ake and Paolina became long-distance pen pals, exchanging letters and photos over the course of a year. They wed in 1958, brought together by the currents of love.
(I think I need to start walking the beach shores more often looking for messages in a bottle…you just never know where love will find you 🙂
“Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh
ichaseferalcats
John Turner
Legally Ohm
Becky Dingle
What a great love story. Douglas and I met on the Internet, and the odds against us marrying and being happy were great, but God placed in my spirit to accept emails from men of all races, not just black men, just after I prayed so hard for a life partner. And we have been married for 14 years, heading toward until death do us part. You are right: We don’t know where love will find us when God is in charge of the search.
The odds are always in your favor when God tosses the dice. 🙂 Love your story!
It will be interesting to see if the storm stirs up a few bottles.