Two thousand and three has been an excellent year for me. First, I got to be Parade Marshal and now I am going to be an angel. I realize that you all expected to me to go from Parade Marshal to Mayor to Director of the Library of Congress. I decided, however, to bypass these lowly rungs on the ladder and go straight to the top. The opportunity to be an angel came unto me at choir practice. The St. John Lutheran Church choir is performing the Christmas cantata "Once Upon a Night." As we were feverishly practicing last Wednesday evening, it suddenly occurred to choir director Bill, that we needed someone to speak the angel part. I (and this is no coincidence) happened to be standing closest to the microphone, so the divine responsibility came to rest upon my shoulders. I am rather shy and don’t like to draw attention to myself, so I made a valiant effort to avoid this heavenly calling. I thought I could get out of it by informing Bill that all the angels I knew were male. There’s Gabriel and Michael. Pastor Klatt was there and said, "No, angels are not necessarily male." So I was stuck. Trying to avoid God’s will is not wise. Remember Jonah? He tried to get out of his assignment from God and you know what happened to him, he was swallowed by a giant fish. Sure, he was rescued later, but it’s not my idea of a pleasant holiday season. In the end, I accepted the celestial task of informing the old and decrepit Zechariah and Elizabeth, that they were going to have baby boy. They had to name him John. The baby John’s divine assignment (which he accepted without argument) was to announce the arrival of Jesus. You know the rest of the story. Billy Graham has a rather fascinating book on angels called "Angels: God’s Secret Agents." If you’re interested, it’s available at the library. We also have the new book by Clive Cussler, "Trojan Odyssey." Dirk Pitt discovered, to his shock, that he had two grown children he had never known — 23-year-old fraternal twins born to a woman he thought had died in an underwater earthquake. Both have inherited his love of the sea: his daughter, Summer, is a marine biologist; his son, himself named Dirk, is a marine engineer. And now they are about to help their father in the adventure of a lifetime. There is a brown tide infesting the ocean off the shore of Nicaragua. The twins are working in a NUMA(r) underwater enclosure, trying to determine its origin, when two startling things happen: Summer discovers an artifact, something strange and beautiful and ancient; and the worst storm in years boils up out of the sky, heading straight not only for them but also for a luxurious floating resort hotel square in its path. The peril for everybody concerned is incalculable. Desperately, Pitt and the rest of the NUMA(r) crew rush to the rescue, but what they find in the storm's wake makes the furies of nature pale in comparison. For there is an all-too-human evil at work in that part of the world, and the brown tide is only a by-product of its plan. Soon, its work will be complete-and the world will be a very different place.
