Shackleton's Fourth Attempt

When Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition collapsed in 1916, he was forced to leave twenty-two men stranded on desolate Elephant Island while he sailed eight hundred miles across the Southern Ocean to find help. He reached South Georgia Island, battered and frostbitten, and immediately organized a rescue ship. It was turned back by pack ice. He tried a second vessel. Blocked again. A third attempt failed when the engine gave out sixty miles from the island. Any reasonable man would have accepted the loss. Twenty-two men against an entire frozen ocean — the math was brutal.

Shackleton refused the math. He secured a fourth ship, a Chilean steamer called the Yelcho, and on August 30, 1916 — four months after leaving his crew — he finally broke through the ice. Every single man was alive. When asked later how he endured four failed attempts, Shackleton said simply that he had promised them he would return.

Jesus told the Pharisees about a shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep in open country to search for one that had wandered off. The religious leaders did the math and found the risk unreasonable. But the shepherd, like Shackleton, refused the calculus of acceptable losses. The Good Shepherd does not weigh the cost of rescue against the value of the lost. He promised He would come back, and He does — through ice, through death, through whatever stands between Him and the one He loves.