When you enter the Titanic Museum....this one in Pigeon Forge....the Volunteer State....(the other is in Branson....the Show Me State)....they make you feel like you are on the gangplank when entering....and hand you a 4x6 card with the random name of one of the 2,240 people that would have come up that gangplank.....along with a little story on that person. At the end of the museum tour you are supposed to look at the list of all of the passengers and crew to see if the person on your card was a survivor. I found the person on my card....they were not a survivor....and I looked at my wife's card....and it was the niece....(a survivor)....of a man who did not survive....and who I had done a post on many years ago....bringing it back about every year. So hear is that self-explanatory post from April of 2017.....
Our Stricken Ship....March, 2017....(I've also named this post....The Last Convert Of John Harper.
I have a few peripheral fascinations in life and one of them would be the Titanic. I never saw the James Cameron film. Oh I did pay for a ticket and sit in one of the comfortable seats with every intention of watching the movie but I walked out about a half hour into the film as its message started to unfold. I watched the 1958 black and white A Night To Remember when I was a child.....and I watched it again for the umpteenth time last night.
With a little research I came up with this quote from the main female character in the Cameron film...."....there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me...in every way that a person can be saved." It put in my mind a real life quote from the sinking of the Titanic. I've written about this before. John Harper was a British Baptist pastor and passenger on the Titanic. He was headed to America as a guest preacher with the possibility of accepting a call at a famous American church. He was travelling with his six year old daughter....(and 31 year old niece)....for he was a widower. After he placed his daughter in a lifeboat it is reported that he shouted "women, children, and the unsaved into the lifeboats."
It is also reported that as he swam up to other people, and as hypothermia was setting is, he challenged them with the gospel of Jesus Christ. There was a meeting of survivors in Ontario, Canada a few years after the disaster. One man stood up and testified how John Harper swam up to him twice as he was holding on to debris and said "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." John Harper....with no life vest for he had given it to another....sank to his death. The man giving this testimony was rescued by a returning lifeboat. He told the gathering this..."I am the last convert of John Harper." Yes, I walked out of Cameron's film and will never view it.
I believe that the sinking of the Titanic was a message to Britain and to America. Everyone thought that the great ship was unsinkable. Two world wars followed. The space shuttle Challenger had a multi-cultural crew...male and female...scientist, military and civilian...Caucasian, Asian, African-American...Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Those iconic pictures of the breakup of the Challenger are still hard to look at.
We don't seem to learn from disasters of the past but we do sometimes learn when we are in them....and this world certainly has disasters ahead of it. (the pandemic was only a few years away) May the church begin to prepare.....and be encouraged with the same words that Paul gave those on his stricken ship.....only to us they point to eternal life...."Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship."
Addendum....September 9, 2024....I highly recommend this Titanic Museum. There are a few surprises....and it takes about two hours to go through. The only thing that I did not like was that it highlighted that James Cameron blockbuster film a few times.....where it would have been much better highlighting....A Night To Remember!
