Welcome to Heart of the Matter Radio with author and host, Cynthia L. Simmons. How does a godly woman live in a world out of sync? Cynthia digs into the issues women face in our complex culture to set a path through the chaos.
It's for women seeking the elegance of God's wisdom. So prepare yourself to listen, learn, and rest. Now here's your host, Cynthia L. Simmons.
Our world is changing fast. Regardless of how we vote, we feel as if we have no voice in our government and we worry that we'll be told what we believe is not legal anymore. And no many of us as Christians are watching this election cycle with a great deal of anxiety because we feel as if Christians are being overlooked and ostracized. It's easy and even tempting to become victims or simply give in.
I prefer people talk about going with the flow. But in scripture, we're called to make choices. A reminder of Joshua who said, Choose this day whom you're going to serve. Paul called himself a bond servant of Christ Jesus, and he counted everything as lost because he wanted to know Christ and wanted to be like he was when he was raised from the dead.
We aren't the first generation to face hardships. In particular, I reminded of World War II. Nobody wanted another global conflict. Too many men died in the Great War.
And peace at any price sounded really good. The spiritual worker we have today rivals that war. Today I have Sarah Sundon and she likes World War II. That's her era.
And she just wrote Three Waters Deep, which is about the opening of the war. Welcome Sarah. Thank you for having me. Sarah, give us a little synopsis, a little picture of what this is about.
Well, Three Waters Deep takes place in 1941 when America was still neutral in the war. And it features Jim Avery, who is a young ensign in the United States Navy. And he is escorting, he serves on a destroyer based in Boston. And he's escorting a like convoys across the Atlantic, even though we were neutral at the time.
And meanwhile back on shore, Mary Sterling is working at the Boston Navy Yard as a secretary. And she starts to notice that there is rumors of sabotage at the shipyard and she wonders what's going on. So she decides to play Nancy True and try to figure out how to sabotage. And so she and Jim work together.
And of course, they just might call him love Long Dley. And it was a fun story to write. It was a fun story. I remember there was one scene in there where Jim had been out with a convoy.
That was after they passed that Lynn Leith Act and they were actually starting to lend and leave some stuff to England. Because basically England was going to go under it without help. And so the president, okay, what was his name? I forgot.
I forgot to write on my tongue. Elizabeth had said we're going to help you. And we had to kind of push America to do it. I say we need to help him by just, you know, either loing himself or letting him lease it.
And so after Jim got back and described what had happened, Mary said it sounds like we're at war. And he said, no, what'd you say? She said, I didn't think we were at war. And he said something like, we are, but no one realizes it.
So, you know, they were kind of in a state of denial. And I think there may be some people today who just went and denied kind of where we are. Can you talk about that just a little? Well, I think we all like to live in a happy place.
It's hard to live in the real world. And sometimes we just kind of want to draw a little happy fear about ourselves and not, you know, deny what's going on in the world. And I'm probably the worst at that. I, you know, have some Pollyanna tendencies and I just want to pretend everything's good and fine around me and everybody's happy.
And meanwhile, you know, bad things are happening. The world situation is scary and the situation in America is equally scary. And it does draw a lot of parallels with the years that America was neutral in World War II because war was raging in Europe. And Japan was running over China.
And most Americans just wanted to put their fingers in their ears and say, it's not happening to us. And we're saying out of it, as long as we keep ourselves safe, that's all that matters. And, you know, other Americans were looking at what was going on overseas and saying, if we don't get involved, we may be standing alone. We may be standing alone.
We may be held before it's too late. Very interesting time period. Interesting. In a lot of ways, the very same thing is happening again because America has stepped off the stage of the world and just letting things happen.
And there's things out there that are not good that are going to start happening. You know, I'm really glad that I've read the last chapter of the Bible. In particular, Mary had some struggles about not wanting to be noticed and not wanting to be seen. As Christians, we kind of want to hide right now.
To get off the stage. What do you think of that tendency? Now, as Christians, we're raised to be humble and to be modest and to, you know, not to, you know, we know pride as a sin. So sometimes we have a tendency to almost hide our actions.
And Mary is an extreme case. She had a kind of traumatic experience in her childhood that played with very dangerous. And so she steps back from anything that might draw her into pride at all. And she's wise to notice the temptation of pride because there's such a fine line between self-confidence and a good pride and a job well done.
And stepping over the edge and saying, well, I'm all back. And so she has that wisdom to know that she needs to stay back. But she holds herself back too far. And she doesn't allow herself to experience some of the good things God wants for her.
Because sometimes we do have to step out there. And she learns that she has to let her light shine before men. And that means that that is a very godly principle too. So she needs to step forward and use her gifts and sometimes make a noise.
Exactly. And, you know, here was this poor lady put in prison for not wanting her name on Mary's certificate. But she stood her ground and I think she did the right thing. All of a sudden, the rules changed and everything that she believed was not the right thing.
It reminds me of a movie I saw of Nazi Germany where an SS attacked a man and said, you've got to pay attention. The rules are changing and they're changing fast. But if you don't pay attention, you'll get in trouble. And that's kind of the way some of us feel.
There's always been a war going on. But I think it's come to the surface and we can see it now. There hasn't been this kind of thing for hundreds of years. You think about how long America's over 200 years old and we haven't done this in a long time.
Which makes it troubling for all of us. Yeah. It is. You know, as a pharmacist, I face situations where, you know, do I stand up for my religious principles or take a risk of losing my job?
And so far I'm blessed I work in hospital with a large staff and I'm able to take that stance without losing my job. But there are other healthcare professionals who are losing their jobs because of those sounds. We talk about freedom of religion but really how frequently we be in our face if we can't practice our professions. If certain faiths are excluded from certain professions, that's the answer we're heading quite rapidly.
Yes, we're going there and that is frightening. Jim in particular is a good example because he just doesn't want to be a leader. He can't make decisions. He made decisions in the past and it kind of didn't turn out right.
And so he's kind of afraid to do that. So how could we avoid being there? Yeah. Well, Jim is basically a very carefree, easygoing guy.
He's the third of seven kids. So he used to following his older brothers and he's intelligent and very friendly and people like him. So things have kind of fallen into place for him. So he hasn't really had to push.
And he finds himself. He went to the Naval Academy. He is an officer on a destroyer. And he's more than willing to let the Navy decide where they want him to be.
And he's fine with that. But he's also finding that he's an officer that he's a situation for his to make hard choices where somebody could get hurt or killed. And that's very difficult for him to do. And he has to learn to step forward and make decisions that are bold and sometimes dangerous and to do the right thing no matter what.
And that's hard. That's very hard. Oh, yeah. And he has to be, I understand I'm a people pleaser too.
And sometimes we make everybody happy. And Jim's that way naturally. And he has to learn. You can't always make everybody happy.
And you have to do the right thing no matter who's happy and who isn't happy. Right. And I think looking back in history, it's very comforting to me to see that people lived through very difficult times. You know, because we go back and go, yeah, turn that OK.
But for the mother that was home with her son in the military, she didn't know he was going to come home or not. Or did they know if Hitler was going to win? The whole world was in danger of being taken up by this guy who was willing to swallow up all of Europe. It was a very scary time.
And that's comforting to me that there are people who hung in there and who believed during that time. And I think that's one of the reasons I write about the war era. Because it's funny because a lot of people say they read historical fiction because it's simpler time. And I look at the World War II era and think, oh, there is nothing simple about living during World War II.
It was a very difficult time to live. But there's something about the nostalgia that draws us to that era that the myths of the simpler time. But when we immerse ourselves in these stories, we see, yes, it was extremely difficult. And they overcame.
And that helps us when we look at our lives and our times, which in many ways are far simpler than in World War II. And I think, OK, if they can handle this, then I can certainly handle my internet being gone for a week, which I can't have a lot of street. No internet, no, no, no. And you might even be able to get more done.
The internet is a great distraction and it takes up a lot of time. Oh, well, no, I was in the middle of a book release online. So I had to live in Starbucks. But it was such a minor happen in the grand scheme of things.
And we make these things are so little, we make them so big in our lives. And then we look at times when it was like a death and people were dying and the fate of the world was at stake. And suddenly we look at our petty world and go, oh, it's OK. So my grandmother wrote to my father during that time.
And I mean, reading their letters back and forth in the war, I think they must have lived out of their guards. And plus, I think she cooked white beans every night of her life. And I'm thinking, you know, did they have some more variety than this? I mean, I know they had stuff from the garden, but white beans?
I mean, so we can be thankful for where we are now in the terms of just the variety that we have and the volume of that we have and we're blessed. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think about one of the biggest problems facing America right now is obesity. There's no short, we have abundance and then some.
And if you look back at the pictures of people at the time, they just come through depression. There weren't many heavy people. No. Because they probably sometimes were hungry.
And you got that later, but not during that period of time. Well, they had less variety of food and less abundance. So they just ate until they were full and stopped. And they're fairly healthy.
We look at their diets and think they're very full of fat and a lot of red meats and butter and lard and things like that. But it was really, very balanced. And they didn't exercise like we do. They just worked.
Yeah. You know, women had the health work that required burning calories. And men were physical and they walked everywhere. And they just, for fun, they danced.
So it was a much more physical society. They didn't have to go to the gym. They were naturally physically active. Yes.
They didn't all have cars and they were walking to work and walking out the church and working out in the garden. I remember they had a garden in the back and my granddad had planted a lot of the countries. And he was so proud when he'd bring those two of us. Even when we got older, he was always harvesting the pecans, bringing them to us.
Because when he was in the world, too, they had to live off that stuff. He was always proud of the pecan. Yeah. You chose to call this in Waters Deep.
Is there a particular imagery there that you want us to get from this time period? Share a little bit about that. Well, the funny thing is that most titles don't actually come from the authors. And that wasn't my original title.
I do like it a lot because it does relate to one of the things first versus for the novel, which is as they have 43, two to three. When it passes through the waters, I will be with thee. When I walk through the fire, that shall not be burned. For I am the Lord, I God.
And just that sense of no matter what horrible things you face, God is going to be with you. And especially for Jim, when he's going on these Atlantic convoys with these raging storms, and the water was so cold it would freeze on their faces and they're facing new boats. And the ships were being sunk, and we're not officially at war. And this is a time where they are going through the deep waters.
And he just has to latch on the fact that God is going to be with them, and that God is going to help them to be the leader he needs to be so that he can do the right thing and serve his men and serve his country. So you're taking this from history. There were actually ships sunk before we were at war. Yes.
One destroyer was sunk, and five merchant ships were sunk by German U-boats between June 41 and before Pearl Harbor. And that struck me, and that's actually what inspired the story. I was just reading this history and thinking, and there was another destroyer that was torpedoed, and a couple of them were killed, though the ship wasn't sunk. So 100s of men had been killed at sea in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor, and I was stunned.
I learned that in history, and I thought, well, why weren't we already at war? And so I began to study that time period more, and it was just so fascinating. Well, what would it be like to be serving on one of those ships where you were actually fighting into boats? Yeah.
But the country is in a war, and back on land, they were arguing whether or not you need to go to war. And it really was that time period in America was very divisive, very angry, very bitter, reminding a lot of the debate going on in America now. A lot of name calling and they had talked TV back then. It would have been dozens now to see the stuff we see now.
Very interesting times. And see, you just wonder why they didn't platter that across the newspapers and say they're sinking our ships. Oh, 100s papers. And nobody got up there?
Nope. That is, yeah, but there was also this impression that the sailors, the US Navy at the time, was also volunteer. So it wasn't like men who had been drafted had been killed. These are men who had volunteered and gone into it willingly.
And the merchant Marines were also, they knew they were going sailing to danger seas. They were doing it willingly. So there just wasn't a huge uproar. There was a small uproar, and in Roosevelt was making changes after one of the incidents he passed a world at the US Navy was to shoot.
You're both on site. This is in September of 1941. And so it was open shooting in the Atlantic. And before Pearl Harbor, it was really interesting.
That is very interesting. I was reading what you wrote and thinking, I just didn't know that that many things happened before Pearl Harbor. I assume Pearl Harbor was the beginning. That is the common image of World War II we have is that, yes, the war was going on and we were staying at home and jitterbugging and everybody was happy and suddenly Pearl Harbor.
Oh, no. But there was a huge buildup to it. Both diplomatically, there was a lot of stuff going on with Japan and its sanctions being passed and it was rapidly escalating and specific and also in the Atlantic. Pearl Harbor was the culmination.
It was going that way anyway. It was going to happen. I know that Britain was hoping it happens later because they weren't scared. And rightly so.
They suffered after the war a lot longer than we did because there were such a small country that the resources were really depleted. Oh, yeah. They were very strict rationing. Americans complained about their rationing, but when they heard the British went through, they really couldn't complain much.
We're beginning to feel heat now, but other people have done it too. And those people turned to the Lord and yes, they did make it through. And we will too. We will.
Sarah, I wanted to thank you for sharing your extensive research with us and just blessing us with truth from the past. Well, thank you. Sarah Sunden.com. You can go there and find your book and probably on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and bookstores.
Thank you for sharing with us and just helping us to get a bigger picture of what our world is like. You've been listening to Heart of the Matter Radio with Cynthia Elsomens. Your comments and questions are always welcome. Contact us at Cynthia at CLSimens.com.
We'd love to hear from you whether you're an author, young mom, a mother of teens, a homeschool mother or an empty nester. Join us next time as Cynthia once again sets a path to growing wisdom and a closer walk with a savior here on Heart of the Matter Radio.