Doctor Grenfell's Perilous Winter Journey
Poem★★★★★Several years ago Doctor Grenfell was called sud- denly to go on a journey of about sixty miles across the ice to treat a man who had just had a very tragic accident. He started late in the afternoon, and in order to save time, tried to cut across a narrow inlet which he thought was frozen over. When he was about half way across this inlet, the ice all about him gave way.
He and the dogs plunged into the water, and when he finally crawled out on a cake of floating ice, he discovered he was drifting out to sea and facing almost certain death. He writes: “Night found me ten miles on my seaward voyage. I had skinned three of my dogs and wrapped their fur about FAITH 127 me asa coat. Their bodies I piled up to make a windbreak on the ice.
At intervals I took off my clothes and wrung them out, swung them in the wind, and then put on first one garment then the other, hoping the heat of my body would dry them. Forcing my biggest dog to lie down, I cuddled up close to him, drew the improvised dogskin rug over me, and went to sleep. The hand that was against the dog stayed warm, but the other was soon frozen.
About midnight I awoke shivering. The moon was just rising. The wind was driving me steadily toward the open sea. But somehow my Christian faith was untroubled.
After all, it was quite natural for me to be passing to the portal of death from that frozen stream; and quite unbidden the words of an old hymn began running through my mind: “My God and Father, while I stray Far from my home on life’s dark way, Oh, teach me from my heart to say, ‘Thy will be done!’ ” Christianity brings a message of victory for even the worst situations.
The point
Doctor Grenfell, drifting on ice and facing certain death, finds untroubled Christian faith with hymn words sustaining him, displaying victory through faith.