The Titanic Sails At Dawn

Who will go down with it?

No sign of Yi Jien

Time's running out for Yi Jien. A 31 August post on The Daily Interlake carried this update:

A Glacier National Park map looks like a child has been scribbling on it for hours, but those curling and zigzagging lines aren’t random scribbles.They depict carefully choreographed routes in the ongoing Yi-Jien Hwa Search and Rescue mission in Glacier National Park.

Hwa, a 27-year-old from Kentucky and Malaysia, was last seen Aug. 11 and the search for him has been under way since Aug. 19.

The map shows helicopter flight routes in purple, ground-search team routes in red, all based on GPS tracking. It shows yellow polygons of areas that have been carefully “scoped” from vantage points along search routes. It does not represent the initial search areas before GPS devices were put to use, nor does it show all of the areas that have been glassed with binoculars and spotting scopes.“We think the map represents 70 percent of the searching we’ve done,” said Dennis Divoky, one of the search team leaders. [More]

Meanwhile back in KL, friends are praying against all odds for some clue, a word, a sign - anything - that could point to a hopeful end. 1 Peter 1:6-7 offers the view that trials come by God's design to prove our faith. Of course, God doesn't need to test us in order to know what we're made of; trials come so that we will know what our own faith is made of. Referring to this passage of Scripture, John Piper wrote:

"...Peter is teaching that the sovereign will of God governs all the distresses that happen to us and, therefore the design in them is not ultimately the design of evil men or the design of Satan (which are real enough!), but is a design of God. "

It does not make one's suffering any less painful, but there is comfort in knowing our distresses will not end in meaninglessness. In times like this, I remember Scott Wesley Brown's song, "He Will Carry You":

if He carried the weight of the world upon his shoulders,
I know my brother that he will carry you ...
if He carried the weight of the world upon his shoulders,
I know my sister that he will carry you ...