Thoughts on Life and Worship

The crew of the Endurance on Elephant Island Life is a marathon.  Finishing does not go to the fast, but to the faithful.  Victory is had only by endurance.  The story of Ernest Shackleton’s heroic expedition in 1914 to Antarctica had a profound impact on me when I read it several years ago.  It is a tale of incredible survival and endurance.  His family motto was, “By endurance we conquer.”  Indeed, that was the name of his ship. The Endurance became stuck in the ice when they were only eighty miles from the Antarctic continent.  Unable to free the boat, it was crushed by the ice pack and sank ten months later.  In 1914, there were no cell phones and there were no radio stations on Antarctica.  Shackleton and his crew of 27 men endured violent hurricane-force winds, temperatures below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, an extreme diet of penguin and seal meat, dangerous ice flows and flagging hope in a seemingly impossible situation. But S...