Get Your Things Ready, Boys

When Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic ice in 1915, he left twenty-two men stranded on desolate Elephant Island while he sailed eight hundred miles across the most treacherous ocean on earth to find help. Months passed. The men huddled under overturned boats, surviving on penguin meat and melted ice, watching an empty horizon.

But every single morning, Frank Wild — Shackleton's second-in-command — woke the men with the same words: "Get your things ready, boys. The boss may come today."

Most mornings, nothing came. The horizon stayed empty. Yet Wild kept saying it. He rolled up his sleeping bag. He packed his gear. He told the others to do the same.

Then on August 30, 1916, a ship appeared through the fog. Shackleton stood at the bow. The men stumbled out from under their boats, shouting, weeping, barely able to believe what their eyes were telling them. Every last one of them was alive.

The women who walked to that garden tomb at dawn were not expecting rescue. They carried spices for a dead man. But the angel's words split the morning open: "He is not here; He has risen." And they ran — with fear and great joy — because the One they thought was gone had come back for them. The empty tomb is God's answer to every morning we have watched the horizon and seen nothing. He comes.