The boy on top of the hull

One · What happened

Three went out from Savoonga

An eighteen-foot boat left Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island, on Friday the 4th with three people aboard. It was due back around three in the morning on Sunday and it did not come. Alaska State Troopers told the Coast Guard about eight-thirty Sunday night. On Monday a Coast Guard HC-130 out of Kodiak, flying the search, found the boat overturned about four miles east of the island with a fifteen-year-old sitting on top of it.

The two others were recovered from the water. Both died. A vessel working nearby, the Northwest Explorer, took the boy and the bodies to Nome. He had symptoms of hypothermia, according to the release. The AP reported that the two who died were his sixteen-year-old brother and a thirty-nine-year-old cousin. Nobody outside that family knows how long he was up there alone, and the Coast Guard's releases do not say.

Two · What it is doing

Relief with somebody else's funeral in it

If you are a parent you probably did two things when you read it. You felt the relief first, the reflex a parent has at the word rescued, and it was real. Then you read about the brother and the relief went sour in your mouth, because you had been glad about a story in which a mother lost a son. Being glad he lived was right, and feeling sick about the rest was right too. Both were happening to you at once, and there is no tidy way to hold them.

And then, for plenty of mothers and fathers, a third thing. You looked at your own boy. Maybe he is fifteen too. Maybe he goes out on a lake with his uncle, or hunts with his friends in November, or just drives to school on a road you do not trust. The story went from Alaska to your kitchen in about four seconds, and for the rest of the day you were a little harder to live with.

What that fear wants from you is simple. Keep him home. Plenty of parents will say something at dinner this week that is really about the Bering Sea. The kid will not know why his mother is suddenly asking where he will be every minute on Saturday. Some of that is wisdom. A good bit of it is a parent trying to buy safety with control. You never had as much of that as you thought.

Three · Where the ground is

What is that to you

At the end of John's gospel Peter has just been told, by the risen Jesus, roughly how his own life will end. He turns around, sees John walking behind them, and asks the most human question in the book. Lord, what about this man? Jesus answers him in John 21:22. If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!

I think about that answer every time one person lives and another does not. Peter wanted to know why the other man would get a different ending. Jesus would not rank the two lives, would not explain one man's days to another man, and pointed Peter back at his own feet. It is a hard word for the boy on the hull, who has to be wondering why he is in Nome while his brother is not. I would not say it to that boy this week. It is the sentence I would want somebody to say to me in a year.

The sea is not yours

Psalm 107 has a section about sailors, people who go down to the sea in ships, and it describes a storm that lifts them to the heavens and drops them to the depths until their courage melts away. They cry to the Lord and He stills the storm. I love that psalm, and it has limits that matter a great deal right now. It tells about men who were brought to their haven and gave thanks. It makes no promise that every boat comes in. Some boats do not. Psalm 95:5 says the sea is His, for He made it. That covers the wind and the swell and the four miles off St. Lawrence Island, and in my opinion it is the one fact about your son's safety you can actually count on.

Your control over him was always partial. God kept him alive every day of his life so far, including the days you did not know he was in danger, and your watching was a small part of that at best. When you let him go out on the water with his uncle this fall, or drive himself to practice, you hand him to that same Father again. You have been doing it for fifteen years. The headline just made you notice.

The boy himself

He is in the story as a number and a relative. But he is also a fifteen-year-old who sat on a boat while two people he loved went into the water, whatever he did or did not see, and he will carry that for the rest of his life. He needs people around him in Savoonga who will not make him explain it. He needs a Savior Isaiah 53:3 calls a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. You know almost nothing about him or his mother. Pray anyway.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Four of these are for your own house. The first one is for St. Lawrence Island.

1. 01

   Pray for the boy and his family tonight, together with your own kids.

   Tell them what happened in a few sentences. Then pray for a fifteen-year-old whose name you do not know and for his mother, who lost a son and got one back in the same week. Children understand that kind of prayer better than we give them credit for.

2. 02

   Check the life jackets in every boat you own.

   Count them. If there are fewer than the seats, buy the rest this weekend. That is ordinary diligence and Proverbs is full of it, and it is not the same thing as trying to control the sea.

3. 03

   Let him go on the trip you were about to cancel.

   A trip that was sound before you read the story is sound now. Pray over him in the driveway, with your hand on his shoulder, and let him go. He will remember the prayer longer than the lecture you were going to give instead.

4. 04

   Tell your husband or your wife what the story did to you.

   One of you is probably quieter about it than the other. Say the actual fear at the table after the kids are in bed, and then pray for your children by name with each other, which a lot of couples have never once done.

5. 05

   Find the person in your church who survived something and never talks about it.

   A car wreck, a fire, a tour overseas. You probably know who. Go sit with him this week, and let him talk about it if he wants to. If he does not, just sit. The boy in Nome needs that from somebody up there. Somebody in your own church has needed it for years.