🧑‍🤝‍🧑 / 🏡 Thought for the Day

Make friends with whatever's next.

Embrace it. Accept it. Don't resist it. Change is not only a part of life; change is a necessary part of God's strategy. To use us to change the world, he alters our assignments. Gideon: from farmer to general; Mary: from peasant girl to the mother of Christ; Paul: from local rabbi to world evangelist. God transitioned Joseph from baby brother to an Egyptian prince. He changed David from a shepherd to a king. Peter wanted to fish the Sea of Galilee. God called him to lead the first church.

God makes reassignments.

- Max Lucado
 
When I first started flying in and out of DCA in the eighties, you could see the newly rebuilt rail section of the 14th Street Bridge. It was taken out by the Air Florida flight that had the deicing malfunction/negligence. I always thought about that flight, particularly when I was sitting in a plane subject to a deicing routine. Most folks know the name Lenny Skutnik, the government employee who leaped into the icy Potomac to complete the rescue of one of the five survivors. He was at Reagan's State of the Union address a few weeks after the crash, beginning a long tradition of recognizing unsung heroes, and they're called "Skutniks" for that reason. The Park Service helicopter crew ferried five to safety (counting the one Skutnik got the rest of the way), because one surviving passenger was handing off life jackets and handed the rescue line to at least two of the five survivors. The "Man in the Water" as he became known, was tangled in the remains of his seat and was pinned in the wreckage. When the helicopter returned for him on its sixth run, the wreckage had rolled, taking him to his death.

It took about a year for the investigation to determine that the Man in the Water was Arland Williams, Jr., a bank examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and a Citadel graduate. The 14th Street Bridge is named after Williams today, but a Time Magazine essay was written in his honor before he was identified:

So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.

— Rosenblatt, R., "The Man in the Water", Time, January 25, 1982
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It seems an appropriate Thought of the Day today.
 


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