Rescued

by Dr. Michael A. Halleen

“Give thanks to (God) and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever.” – Psalm 100:4, 5

One night many years ago, Ed Spencer, a student at a seminary near Lake Michigan, was awakened by shouts that there had been a shipwreck offshore from the campus. An excursion boat from the nearby Chicago harbor had collided with a freighter and was sinking. Spencer ran down to the lakeshore from which he could see lights from the boats. A strong swimmer, he plunged into the icy water and started searching for survivors.

For six hours Spencer swam out and back, pulling people ashore, battling stormy waves and powerful undertow. By dawn he had personally rescued fifteen people in as many trips. Exhausted, he sat down until someone spotted two more still in the water. Spencer dove in again and found a man and a woman clinging desperately to a piece of wreckage. He brought them in too and collapsed on the beach.

Fewer than one-fourth of the 400 passengers on that boat survived the shipwreck, seventeen of them rescued by Ed Spencer. His own health, however, was irreparably damaged by his act of heroism, and he was never able to return to school, ultimately living out his days as an invalid.

Years later, a reporter doing a story on Great Lakes tragedies found Spencer as an old man in a nursing home in California and asked for his recollections of that night. He said bitterly, “The only thing I remember is that not one of the seventeen ever thanked me.”

The late British actor Robert Morley once said, “I am not an introspective man, but I am, I hope, a grateful one. Life has treated me kindly, and I hope I shall always be mindful that for over fifty years the sun has shone on my back. Thanks be to God.”

At a Thanksgiving gathering several years ago we invited our guests – in the spirit of Robert Morley – to list several things for which he or she was grateful. We wrote each one down and arranged them into a song which we then sang as a group, using a familiar tune. The variety itself (from “clean sheets” and “my boss,” to “cancer survived” and “Randy Moss” – amazing how the rhymes fell into place) became a feature of the hymn, our recognition that God’s gifts are far-reaching and never-ending.

Thanks be to God for life, for its circumstances common and rare, and for the sunshine on our backs. Thanks be also to the people who touch our lives in great ways and small, and for the sunshine they bring to our hearts.