"In Times Like These, We Need a Saviour"

This week has been interesting. It feels as though every phone call and client contact has been one of great intensity. It is often that way, as every call can be about life and death at a pregnancy center. This week the calls have seemed especially desperate. I am so thankful to be able to rely on the WORD of God as I seek to help people in crisis. I have been meditating on the hymn sited below in order to help me stay focused this week; maybe it will be an encouragement to you also. I have often told my clients that we need to be "super-glued" to the Rock that is Jesus! I found this great story about holding on to hope. HOPE you enjoy it. too!

The Anchor

In times like these, we need a Savior.
In times like these, we need an anchor.
Be very sure, be very sure
Your anchor holds, and grips the Solid Rock

The rock is Jesus, yes He’s the One.
This rock is Jesus, the only One.
Be very sure, be very sure
Your anchor holds, and grips the Solid Rock

(“In Times Like These” by Ruth Caye Jones)

One of the most fascinating men who ever lived was a sea captain named James Cook. I have always been interested in reading about him, because I have traveled to many of the places where he explored the world of the late 1700s in a creaky sailing vessel, Resolution, with a sister-ship named Discovery.

I live here in Alaska on a bluff across the bay of Cook Inlet, which goes into Prince William Sound, named by Cook for the English king's third son. Our largest city, Anchorage, lies at its entrance. Captain Cook's two ships anchored here for repairs after a near-disastrous leak had sprung in the Resolution, but on his charts it was called "Cape Hold-with-Hope". They had left England to find the elusive passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but it was never found, and afterwards they would head out into the Alaska peninsula, which in turn fractures into the Aleutian chain.

Finding a suitable anchorage always concerns sailors. Along the coast of Cape Horn, in 1578, Sir Francis Drake's chaplain wrote:

"The winds were such as if the bowels of the earth had set all at liberty, or as if all the clouds under heaven had been called together to lay their force upon that one place. The seas...were rolled up from the depths, even from the base of the rocks, as if they had been a scroll of parchment...The impossibility of anchoring or spreading any sail, the most made seas, the lee shores, the dangerous rocks, the contrary and most intolerable winds...all offered us such small likelihood of escaping destruction, that if the special providence of God himself had not supported us, we could never have endured this woeful state..."

Ruth Jones's "In Times Like These" speaks of such situations where all that can be done by man's efforts is exhausted, and were it not for the LORD, we could not make it through our trials to lower our anchor into the safe "Cape Hold-with-Hope".

Surely, all of us are familiar with such moments where terror could overwhelm our minds when all about us we see the waves roaring and rising above our heads. Cook had once been shocked to discover worms had eaten away at his ship, and another time that coral had ripped the hull and ice coated the rigging as they navigated through the icebergs of Antarctica. It was never easy, nor was it ever certain they would return back to England safely. How many times their journals reflect their trust in the Lord.