Free Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley

on trial inexplicably endure, yet the church does not shun such couples because they continue to live together in “unholy” matrimony. These variations are not explained by a miscarriage of grace at the time these unions were conceived. They are simply an expression of the human condition.
    I am no theologian, but I do take to heart the advice of St. Paul to “test everything, and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5: 21). I tested these questions for years, and I could never reconcile the Christ who offered living water at Jacob’s Well to a woman with five husbands (John 4:18) with the church that was now offering me a choice between a show trial and a life of abject loneliness. Of all the qualities that describe Christ’s life and mission on Earth, legalism and a preference for form over substance are not among them.
    On this night at sea, in the sixty miles that separate Beaufort and Masonboro Inlet, I pondered these questions again as I had many times before and came to the same conclusion: I believe that the blood of Christ is sufficient to atone not just for some of our weaknesses and failures, but for all of them, and that the mercy of Christ is sufficient to allow us—all of us—to try again when we fail to imitate Him.

Chapter 14
A Voice in the Darkness
    I arrived off Masonboro Inlet on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, happy to be alive and marveling again at how the slow accretion of wind and time can move an 11,700-pound vessel such a distance so easily. I was anxious to make the docks at Southport, some twenty-five miles away, because of the difficulty in navigating the shallows of Snow’s Cut in the Intracoastal Waterway at night.
    One has to go through the waterway on the route from Masonboro Inlet to Southport to avoid Frying Pan Shoals off Bald Head Island. Bald Head is the thorn-shaped southeastern tip of North Carolina that juts out into the Atlantic. The seas heap up here where the ocean rises from deep water onto the shoals.
    The shoals extend far out to sea, near the western edge of the Gulf Stream. To sail south, offshore, and get safely around them, you would have to enter the Gulf Stream and fight your way against a current pushing north at three knots. It is easier and safer to motor the shorter distance down the Intracoastal Waterway and come out at Southport, where the offshore route all the way to Florida is deep water well west of the stream.
    I had made the inland passage through Snow’s Cut a half dozen times at night by necessity. Each one was as nerve-wracking as the last, but one in particular stood out in my memory.
    It was January 2007, and three men had sailed with me to take the Gypsy Moon from New Bern to Bald Head Island. After a windless night on the offshore run from Beaufort, a brisk southwest breeze arrived at midmorning off Masonboro Inlet, and we could not resist riding it well offshore, just to let the boat stretch her legs. That worthwhile diversion cost us daylight, however, and we found ourselves crawling through Snow’s Cut after dark.
    The cut is wide and deep where it passes under the highway bridge, but farther south, in the Cape Fear River, the distances between markers in the channel grow longer, and the water outside the channel shoals to inches thin. To avoid running aground, I had one man on the bow using a spotlight to find the next channel marker, one man on the helm, and one man below, calling out depths from the chart. I was watching the depth sounder and the three of them. The helmsman was following a compass course based on the chart when depth soundings that had been steadily above twenty-two feet started to fall. The boat needed close to five feet of water to float. The channel depth was not uniform, though, and there were some places within the channel proper that had shoaled. It was not immediately clear that we were off course.
    As the number on the depth sounder continued to drop and passed sixteen, I asked the chart