All Safe, All Well

On April 24, 1916, Ernest Shackleton left twenty-two men stranded on Elephant Island, a desolate strip of rock off Antarctica, and set out in a twenty-two-foot lifeboat across eight hundred miles of the most violent ocean on earth. The men he left behind huddled under overturned boats, rationing penguin meat, watching the horizon. Weeks passed. Then months. The Antarctic winter closed in. Some stopped looking toward the sea altogether.

Four months and six days later, on the morning of August 30th, a man on watch spotted a ship cutting through the fog. He could not believe it. He shouted. Men stumbled out from under the boats, gaunt and frost-bitten, squinting at the impossible sight. Standing on the bow of the Chilean tug Yelcho was Shackleton himself — the one they had given up for dead. Before the ship even anchored, he called across the water: "Are you all well?" And twenty-two voices answered back: "All safe! All well!"

That is what the women found at dawn in Matthew 28. They came to a tomb expecting nothing but death and the cold work of anointing a body. Instead, the stone was rolled away, an angel spoke, and then Jesus Himself met them on the road — alive, impossible, radiant. Their grief broke open into terrified joy.

The Almighty has never left His people without a rescue. And the good news of Easter is not simply that the tomb was empty — it is that the One they mourned came back for them, calling across the divide: "Do not be afraid."