The Grip That Never Loosened

In 1915, Ernest Shackleton watched the Antarctic ice slowly crush his ship, the Endurance, like a walnut in a vise. Stranded on frozen pack ice with twenty-seven men, thousands of miles from civilization, every reasonable calculation said they were dead.

But Shackleton made a decision that became his single obsession: not one man would be lost. Not one.

He led them across drifting ice floes for months, then crammed them into three salvaged lifeboats through the most savage seas on earth. When they finally reached the desolate rocks of Elephant Island, Shackleton still was not finished. He sailed eight hundred miles in a twenty-two-foot boat through hurricane-force winds to South Georgia Island, then crossed unmapped mountains on foot to reach a whaling station. He immediately organized a rescue.

Every single man survived. All twenty-eight. Shackleton's grip on his crew never loosened, not once, through two years of unimaginable conditions.

When the religious leaders in Jerusalem pressed Jesus for a plain answer about his identity, he pointed not to arguments but to relationship. "My sheep hear my voice," he said. "I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand."

Shackleton held twenty-seven men through Antarctic ice by sheer human will, and even that grip could have failed. But the hand that holds every believer belongs to the One who declared, "I and the Father are one." That grip is not human determination. It is divine love — and it does not let go.