CORBAN

"Give us today our daily bread."

Matthew 6:11

This story is about an ocean that got greedy and tried to grab far more than it could ever need. The Bible says we never have to grab like that. We can simply ask God, who loves to give His children exactly enough, one day at a time.

Before this story starts, you need to know three things about a boy named Corban. If you skip them, the rest of the book will still work, but you will be confused at the good parts, and nobody wants that.

Thing one. Corban was seven years old. That is young for a hero, I know. It is too young to drive a car, too young to stay up past nine, and way too young to be the only person standing between a whole city and a very wet disaster. Nobody asked Corban if he felt ready. The trouble just showed up one Tuesday and rang the doorbell, the way trouble likes to do.

Thing two. Corban had red hair, a face full of freckles, and a kick that could snap a board clean in half. He had earned his first taekwondo belt that spring, and he practiced in the backyard until the sun went down, which matters more than you think, because the thing about being brave is that it is mostly just practicing when nobody is clapping.

Thing three, and this is the big one, so lean in close. Corban had a secret. When the ocean turned mean, when grown-ups grabbed their towels and ran the wrong way, Corban ran the right way. Toward it. Because Corban was also someone else. Someone with a blue suit, a glowing chest, and a job nobody gave him that he decided to do anyway.

They called him Super Corban.

Okay. Now you know the three things. Turn the page. The ocean is about to do something it has never done before, and we should probably be there when it happens.

Here is the most important fact in the whole book, and you have to promise not to tell, because if the bad guys ever found out, we would all be in big, soggy trouble.

The suit did not run on batteries.

It did not run on solar panels, or double-A's, or one of those chargers your dad is always yelling about because somebody borrowed it again. The little round light in the center of Super Corban's chest ran on something you cannot buy at any store, no matter how much money you have.

It ran on courage.

Real courage. Not the fake kind, where you are not scared at all because the thing is easy. The real kind, where your knees are knocking and your stomach is doing somersaults and you step forward anyway, because somebody has to and today it gets to be you.

When Corban was brave, the light in his chest glowed like a tiny blue sun. It was warm. It was bright. It made the gadgets in his gloves hum and the boots on his feet lift right off the ground.

And when Corban was afraid, truly afraid, the kind of afraid that makes you want to be small? The light got dim. The suit got heavy. And the boots stayed exactly where they were.

Corban's dad had helped him build the suit out in the garage, with a watch on the wrist and a screwdriver that was always going missing. His dad never said the suit ran on courage. He said something a little different. He tapped the glowing circle one night and said, "You did not put the brave in there, bud. God did. The suit just shows everybody what was already inside you."

Corban liked that. He did not fully understand it yet. But he liked it, and he tucked it away in his chest right next to the light, where the most important things go.

Now we have to leave Corban for a minute, which I know is rude, but every good story needs a bad guy, and ours was at that very moment sitting at the bottom of the sea being extremely grumpy about it.

His name was Doctor Undertow.

A long time ago, before he was a villain, he had been a regular ocean scientist with a regular boring name. He loved the sea more than anything. He thought it was the most beautiful, most powerful thing on the whole planet. And he was not wrong about that part.

But here is where he went sideways. He decided the ocean did not get enough respect. People swam in it without saying thank you. They left their trash in it. They built their towns right up next to it like it was no big deal. And the more Doctor Undertow thought about it, the more a nasty little idea grew in his head like algae on a forgotten sandwich.

"If they will not respect the ocean," he said, "then I will simply give them MORE of it."

His plan was this. He had built a machine, an enormous, churning, clanking machine called the Tide Engine, and when he switched it on, it would pull the ocean up and up and up, higher than the piers, higher than the rooftops, until the whole city of Galveston was tucked safely underwater forever. "Safe," of course, was Doctor Undertow's word. Everybody else would have used a different word, like "drowned," or "extremely not okay."

And he was not going to do it alone. Oh no. From the gunk at the bottom of the sea, from the oil and the old tires and the soda cans nobody threw away properly, he had cooked up an army of little green helpers. They were called the Sludge Squad. They were not very smart. They were not very strong. But there were a lot of them, and they did exactly what he said, which is the most dangerous kind of helper there is.

Doctor Undertow put his hand on the great rusty lever of the Tide Engine. His glowing green eyes glowed a little greener.

"Galveston," he said. "Time to get wet."

And he pulled the lever.

It was a perfect day at the beach right up until it absolutely was not.

One second, kids were building sandcastles and grown-ups were pretending to read books while actually taking naps. The next second, the water pulled back from the shore all at once, way too far, like a blanket getting yanked off a bed. Fish flopped on the wet sand. Crabs looked around, confused. Somewhere, a beach ball rolled away and was never seen again.

Then the water came back. But it did not come back like normal water. It came back green and bubbling and angry, and it was full of little green things with big mouths.

People grabbed their kids and their coolers and ran for the parking lot. Lifeguards blew their whistles so hard their faces turned purple. It was chaos. It was loud. It smelled, as promised, like the inside of a very old shoe.

And up on the boardwalk, one seven-year-old boy did not run away.

Corban stood very still and watched the green things flop and snap toward the shops where families were hiding. His heart was pounding. His mouth went dry. Every single part of his body wanted to turn around and run with everybody else, and that part of him had a lot of good points, honestly.

But Corban looked at the little kids crying behind the snow-cone stand. And he looked at his wrist, at the watch his dad had helped him build, the one with the little blue button.

He took one big, shaky breath.

"Okay," he whispered. "Okay. Here we go."

And he pressed the button.

If you have never seen a superhero suit up close, here is how it goes, and I promise I am only exaggerating a little.

The watch went BEEP. Then it went BEEP BEEP. Then a thousand tiny blue plates came zipping out of nowhere, the way iron filings jump to a magnet, and they snapped onto Corban one after another. Boots. Legs. Chest, with the round light right in the middle. Gloves with the gadgets built in. And last of all, the helmet, the cool one that left his face showing so the bad guys would know exactly who was kicking them.

The light in his chest flickered, then caught, then glowed a steady, brave blue. Corban felt his boots get light. He felt the gloves start to hum. And just like that, the shaky kid on the boardwalk was gone, and Super Corban stood in his place.

He did not waste any time. He dove off the boardwalk, landed in the sand with a THOOM, and went to work on the Sludge Squad.

And listen, this part was actually kind of fun, so I am going to let you enjoy it.

Corban spun. Round kick! Three mooks went flying like green bowling pins. He ducked, he rolled, he popped back up. Front kick! A mook sailed clear over the snow-cone stand and landed in a trash can, which, honestly, was the perfect place for it. The little kids behind the stand stopped crying and started cheering. Somebody yelled, "GET 'EM, KID!" Corban grinned inside his helmet.

For about ninety seconds, Super Corban was winning, and it felt amazing, and he started to think maybe, just maybe, this was going to be easy.

It was not going to be easy.

You knew this was coming. Every hero has a moment like this. It is the moment where the bad guy stops sending the little guys and shows up himself, and it is never, ever a good time.

The ocean rose up in a wall of green water taller than the Ferris wheel. And riding the top of it, on a throne of junk, with the great clanking Tide Engine churning behind him, came Doctor Undertow.

He was enormous. He was dripping. His glowing eyes found the little blue figure standing alone on the beach, and he laughed a laugh that bounced off the clouds.

"Go home, little hero," Doctor Undertow boomed. "Go home to your dry little house while you still can. In one hour, there will be no more beach. No more boardwalk. No more Galveston. Just water, all the way up, the way it was always meant to be."

And then he did the worst thing a villain can do. He did not yell. He leaned down, close, and he said it quietly, just for Corban.

"You are too small. You were always going to be too small. You should be afraid."

And here is the thing about being told you are too small. Sometimes a little part of you believes it.

Corban's stomach dropped. The little kids were still hiding. The water was still rising. Doctor Undertow was the biggest, meanest thing he had ever seen, and he was right, wasn't he? Corban was small. He was seven. He was a white belt. What was he even doing out here?

And down in the center of his chest, the little blue light began to fade.

It went from a bright, brave sun to a dim, flickering candle. His boots got heavy. His gloves stopped humming. For the first time since he put the suit on, Super Corban could not lift off the ground.

The suit was running out of courage.

Now. This is the most important chapter in the book. If you only remember one part, remember this one.

Super Corban stood there with the light in his chest going dark, and he was about to give up. He really was. It would have been the easy thing, and the easy thing was looking very good right about then.

But standing in that cold green water, with a giant villain laughing above him, Corban remembered something. He remembered his dad in the garage, tapping the little glowing circle with one finger.

"You did not put the brave in there, bud. God did. The suit just shows everybody what was already inside you."

And Corban thought about that. Really thought about it, for the first time.

If the brave was already inside him, then Doctor Undertow had it backwards. The light did not make Corban brave. Corban being brave made the light. Which meant the villain could call him small all day long, and it would not matter one single bit, because being brave was never about being big.

Being brave was about choosing to step forward. And that, Corban could do at any size.

Corban lifted his head. He looked the giant villain right in his glowing green eyes. And he said the bravest thing you can say when you are scared, which is also the simplest.

"I might be small. But I'm not going anywhere."

And the light in his chest did not just come back on. It EXPLODED back on, blue and white and brighter than the sun off the water, so bright that Doctor Undertow had to shield his eyes, so bright that every kid hiding behind the snow-cone stand felt warm all over for no reason they could explain.

His boots lifted off the sand. His gloves screamed to life. And Super Corban rose up into the air to meet a villain ten times his size, completely terrified, and going anyway.

What happened next took about eleven seconds, and people in Galveston told the story for years, and every time they told it the kick got a little higher and the splash got a little bigger, which is exactly how the best stories are supposed to grow.

Super Corban flew straight at Doctor Undertow. The villain swung a giant dripping arm to swat him out of the sky, but Corban had been practicing dodging in the backyard every single evening, remember? He rolled left. The arm whooshed past.

"Gloves," Corban said, "let's light it up." And from each glove came a humming blue rope of energy that wrapped around the Tide Engine, the big clanking machine that was pulling the ocean up. Corban yanked with everything he had. The machine groaned. Bolts popped. It started to tip.

And then, with the machine tipping and the villain off balance and the whole ocean holding its breath, Super Corban pulled his knee up, exactly the way he had a thousand times in the backyard, pointed his foot, and let fly the best flying side kick of his entire seven-year-old life.

He hit the Tide Engine dead center.

The great machine cracked in half. The ocean it had been holding up came crashing back down where it belonged, in a wave so big and so happy to be free that it swept Doctor Undertow head over flippers and rolled him all the way back out to sea, sputtering and spinning and yelling things that little kids should not hear.

And the water, the regular blue friendly water, settled back onto the beach like nothing had ever happened at all.

By the time the families came creeping out from behind the snow-cone stand, the beach was calm again. The sun was getting low and turning everything gold. And the strange thing was, almost nobody saw the boy in the blue suit slip away.

Corban found a quiet spot on the dunes, away from the cheering, and he took off his helmet and just sat for a minute. His hands were still shaking a little. That surprised him. He had won. Why were his hands still shaking?

And then he understood, and it made him smile.

The shaking was the proof. Brave was never about not being scared. He had been scared the whole entire time, from the second he pressed the button to the second the wave swallowed up Doctor Undertow. He had just decided, over and over, the scared and the brave at the same time, to step forward anyway.

He looked out at the water, all calm and gold and glittering, and he thought about what his dad always said. He still did not understand every part of it. But he understood more than he had that morning.

The brave was already inside him. It had been the whole time. The suit just showed everybody what was already there.

Corban tucked his helmet under his arm, brushed the sand off his knees, and headed home for dinner, because even superheroes have to be home for dinner, that is simply the rule.

Behind him, far out past the waves, something green and grumpy and very wet was already starting to plot its revenge. But that, my friend, is a story for another book.

THE END.
(for now)

Super Corban is a made-up adventure. But the truth hidden inside this one comes from a real story in the Bible, in Exodus, chapter 16.

Long ago, God's people were hungry out in the desert, with no food anywhere in sight. So every single morning, God sent special bread called manna, resting on the ground like dew. There was always exactly enough for every person for that day.

God gave just one rule. Take only what you need for today. But some people got greedy and grabbed extra to hide away for themselves. And every bit of that hoarded bread went rotten and wormy by morning. The ones who simply trusted God to send more tomorrow always woke up to find they had enough.

The greedy ocean wanted to grab up everything, exactly like those hoarders. But God teaches us we never need to be greedy or afraid. He always provides for His children.