What loss would not merely wound us, but unmake us? The children? The approval? The health? The life we have so carefully constructed? Good gifts, all of them. Terrible gods. Everything else will give way. He will not.

12 Minutes to the Bottom

The Atlantic in November is not a place that offers second chances. It takes what it takes, and it usually takes it quickly.

On the night of November 22, 1873, the SS Ville du Havre was struck broadside by an iron-hulled sailing vessel in the dark water south of Newfoundland. The collision happened without warning. One moment the ship was crossing, the next its hull was open to the sea. Those who survived described what followed as a kind of terrible orderliness: the water rising, the decks tilting, the screaming, and then the silence. The whole catastrophe lasted a mere twelve minutes.

Horatio Spafford’s four daughters (Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta) were all asleep in their cabin when the disaster began. Their mother, Anna, fought to reach them once their bodies were flung into the frigid waters. Once she found them, she fought to hold onto them, then fought the water itself to save her family, but every attempt failed. She was found clinging to wreckage, unconscious. She had been saved by a floating plank, but her daughters were lost to the depths below.

When Anna reached the shore at Cardiff, she sent a cable to her husband in Chicago. Two words, paid by the letter, were sent: “Saved alone”.

Their grammar is perfect and their meaning is annihilating. They arrive not even as a complete sentence but as a door swinging open into a place no one wants to go. Saved alone. Everything behind her in the water. Everything ahead of her in that cable, traveling across an ocean to a man who would have to read it, and keep reading it, and understand its horror over and over again.

What do you do with that? What do you do with your hands as you hold that kind of message?

Humans as Load Bearing Creatures

Here is a thing that is true about human beings: we are, all of us, load-bearing creatures. We do not merely love the people and things in our lives—we build our lives on them. We mortise our hope into their presence. We run the weight of our meaning, our peace, our sense of a navigable future, down through the people we love and into what we believe they will always be. We do this, as well, with things like our careers, marriages, children, and a litany of other things. To us, these are not just good things we enjoy. They become, quietly and without our full consent, the subfloor beneath the floor—the thing that keeps the larger structure of our lives upright and standing. And, all of us do this.

The medieval reformer Martin Luther had a way of describing this tendency, saying “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in,” he wrote, “that is really your god.” Not what you profess to love most. Not what you would say, if you were asked, was the center of your life. No. Luther was teaching us that whatever our hearts run to—in the dark, or in the diagnosis, or in the moment the ship is tilting—that is what we have actually trusted. That is our load-bearing wall.

The Load Bearing Finder

Because humans are perpetually prone to building our lives on the wrong load-bearing structures, the First Commandment exposes us. God does not merely forbid carved idols. He says, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” That distinction is not cosmetic. An idol is a visible object that can be smashed. A god is whatever we lean on for weight, whatever we trust to steady us, whatever we believe must remain standing if our lives are to remain intact. Idols can be identified and denounced in public. Gods are the hidden load-bearing walls of the heart. They stand quietly beneath the surface, holding up our sense of safety and meaning, and we rarely recognize them until the tremor comes and the structure begins to crack.

And in this way, most of us will never know what we have actually built our lives on until it is taken. This is the kind of mercy, if you can call it that, of an easy life. Because it lets you go on believing that God is your foundation when you have never once had to test whether your life would remain standing if everything else were taken away. We are like people who live in a house for decades without ever reading the blueprints. The ceiling is up. The walls are standing. And all seems well.

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