The Night the Endurance Died

In October 1915, Ernest Shackleton stood on the frozen Weddell Sea and listened to his ship die. The Endurance, trapped for nine months in Antarctic pack ice, was being slowly crushed by pressures no human engineering could withstand. Oak beams snapped like kindling. Iron rivets shot across the deck. The hull groaned and shrieked as millions of tons of ice closed in, and there was nothing any man could do to stop it.

They watched the Endurance buckle, splinter, and finally slip beneath the frozen sea.

The psalmist knew this kind of awe. In Psalm 29, the voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon — trees that towered a hundred feet and endured for centuries, shattered like matchsticks. That voice shakes the wilderness, strips forests bare, and twists mighty oaks. Before such power, every creature can only do one thing: in His temple, all cry, "Glory!"

But the psalm does not end with destruction. It ends with a promise: "The Lord gives strength to His people; the Lord blesses His people with peace." The same force that crushed the Endurance could not crush the men who sailed her. Shackleton brought all twenty-seven of his crew home alive across eight hundred miles of open ocean. The God whose voice shatters cedars is the same God who carries His children through the ice.