A BEACH IN MOZAMBIQUE

ON A BEACH IN MOZAMBIQUE One night, while our tour group was sitting in chairs, in a circle, around a glowing fire, at an Indian Ocean beach resort, a mere 500 yards from yet-apartheid Republic of South Africa--in Ponta da Uro , Mozambique--a Marxist-leaning, colored, college professor had angrily, even aggressively, asked: me, "Who made you God?" This was his bold, if melodramatic, attempt to justify himself before his like-minded colleagues, who had earlier quarreled with me over the expediency of the King James Bible that they had not even deigned to read, but which I had just finished reading, after two years in 1983. I do not now recall my particular riposte; but I did reply. I might have said that God made me, made us, in God's "own likeness and image" unless, of course, you had all made yourselves. I might have cited Psalm 82:6 or another scripture. What I know that I did do, was to pick up my bag and walk, back to my hotel room, rather than remain, needlessly arguing with people who needed more my teaching, than my censure. In walking back, I felt the soft sand beneath my feet; I heard the ocean's roar as it rolled in from the deep, and felt its salty breeze. I looked up, marveling at the black, bejeweled sky, whose infinite, luminous stars, outshone the fading, tour group's campfire : then said to myself: "Oh Lord, my God, how great thou art!"