They Have No Wine

      Joseph and Charles were traveling home from a league softball game under an emerging dusk when Charles decided to engage his teammate in a rousing Christian denomination debate.

     "Tell me again why you Catholics worship...oh, wait...honor Mary?" Charles, a firefighter by trade, goaded.

     "Besides the fact Elizabeth; filled with the Holy Spirit, and Simeon the righteous man; also filled with the Holy Spirit, all spoke to her in meaningful ways worthy of documentation in the Gospels?" Joseph replied.

     "Yeah, I know. Someone filled with the Holy Spirit is as good as God speaking to you. Still, she is just a vessel."

     Joseph tsk-tsked at his friend's summation of the Blessed Mother as he navigated the wheel and ramped up onto the highway enroute to the neighborhood they lived in.

     "C'mon Joseph. What really does it for you for having devotion for her?" Charles pried.

     "The Wedding at Cana. It was Mary's intercession that led to Jesus' first miracle and sent Him on his ministry," Joseph announced with a broad smile, keeping in the slow lane to allow time for their back-and-forth conversation to come to fruition.

     Charles rolled his eyes and huffed, stealing intermittent glances at the cars behind them in the side passenger mirror.

"They have no wine," Joseph sang.

     "Anybody at the wedding could've said that," Charles stated flatly, as he pointed to the exit ramp to alert Joseph not to miss it. The two were met with a series of red lights on the city street, without any luck of green.

     "How did Mary know?" Joseph asked, in a pondering tone, as if lost in thought.

     "Huh?"

     Joseph relayed the passage where Mary tells the servants to do whatever He tells you. "How did Mary know Jesus would turn the water into wine?"

     "I don't know. That doesn't make her a great intercessor," Charles snapped back, and then suddenly noticed through the two cars to the right of them a blazing fire from a house a half a block away. Charles instinctively produced his phone and called the fire house that he was stationed at, which was the nearest one to the fire.

     Just then, a woman flailing her arms ran past onlookers and toward the line of cars waiting for the light to change. "My little boy is inside," she screamed, bypassing the two cars to their right and to their passenger window.

     "Please, my baby is inside," she sobbed, as Charles exited the vehicle and retrieved picnic blankets from the hatch of Joseph's SUV.

     Charles, overcome with emotion and an elevated heartbeat, ran toward the blaze and found the entire house engulfed in flames. "Father, your grace is sufficient for me and the child. Let Thy will be done," he mouthed to himself while insulating himself with the blankets.

     The firefighter hurried inside, dodging fire that snapped at his legs. He could hear feint cries of the boy as he zig-zagged around flames. Trusses crumbled above him, and gravity took the framing to the floor, barely missing him.

     The emergency vehicles arrived, and Joseph alerted them that Charles was inside trying to rescue a kid.

     Charles located the boy and scooped him into his arms, swaddling him in one of the blankets. The two coughed for air as he stumbled toward the mouth of the entrance, losing oxygen along the way. As he neared the entrance, a truss fell and struck his back shoulder, causing him to trip over embers. A firefighter caught the child before Charles collapsed to the fiery floor, and another firefighter dragged him out of the house and toward EMTs on the scene.

     The next day, Charles awoke in a hospital room spying his friend Joseph in a seat beside him. The doctor came in and announced the firefighter was extremely fortunate he lived, but his recovery from the burns would be slow. He exited the room with a tap of Charles' forearm and stated more tests would be run to monitor him.

     Charles and Joseph sat in silence for a while before a mumbling question filtered out of the mouth of the patient. "How did she know?" Charles asked, searching the tiled ceiling.

     Joseph smiled with the warm feeling he knew what his friend was wondering about. How the woman bypassed pedestrians and other cars and made a beeline straight to Charles, the only one that could help her and her child's immediate need before the emergency workers arrived. "They have no wine," Joseph sang.

     "It was a miracle," Charles exclaimed and wrestled a reflective smile as he paused in thought. "Well, my friend, you certainly have given me something to think about."