"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1). A crisis strips life back to the basics. It shows us what people are really made of, and it shows us how much we need one another.
These two stories about crisis, retold in our own words, are both true. The first takes us to a French mountain village during the Second World War, where ordinary Christians quietly did what had to be done. The second takes us into one of the deadliest storms in the history of ocean racing, where a stricken crew could do nothing but hold on and wait for help. Each ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- Le Chambon: The Village That Did What Had to Be Done
- Storms: The Sword of Orion and the 1998 Sydney to Hobart
Le Chambon: The Village That Did What Had to Be Done
Estimates of how many people Le Chambon and the surrounding villages sheltered vary widely, from several hundred Jews who stayed for long periods to around 5,000 refugees who passed through. In 1990 the whole town was honoured by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
It has often been said that there are two things human beings cannot look at directly without going mad: the glory of God and the darkness of human evil.
After years of studying human cruelty, Philip Hallie, a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University and a veteran of the Second World War, must have felt close to that edge. He was working on a project about Nazi cruelty, and his research had led him to the medical experiments Nazi doctors carried out on Jewish children in the death camps.
Hallie later described what those years did to him. Across all of his studies, he wrote, the pattern of the strong crushing the weak repeated itself again and again, until he was either bitterly angry or numbly bored by the endless repetition of persecution. His study of evil had become a prison, he said. Its bars were his bitterness towards the violent, and its walls were his horrified indifference to slow murder. Over the years, in his own words, he had dug himself into hell.
It was during this dark time that Hallie came across a short article about a small town of around three thousand people in the mountains of southern France. The town, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, had become one of the safest refuges for Jews anywhere in German-occupied Europe.
He read it with the detachment of a scholar, trying to classify types of cruelty and forms of resistance. But about halfway down the third page he noticed what he called a strange sensation on his cheeks. Thinking it was a speck of dust, he reached up to wipe it away. It was tears, and not just one or two drops. His whole cheek was wet. Those tears, Hallie later wrote, were an instinctive expression of moral praise.
What he was reading was his introduction to the people of Le Chambon and their rescue of thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish children, during the war. Hallie went on to tell their story in his modern classic Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979). One of his readers summed it up in words that Hallie came to embrace: the Holocaust was the storm, with its thunder, lightning, wind and rain, and Le Chambon was the rainbow. Hallie concluded that, for him too, the small story of Le Chambon was grander and more beautiful than the bloody war that stopped Hitler.
What shines through his account is the stubborn courage of the people of Le Chambon. They were Huguenots, French Protestants whose faith in Christ had been shaped by around three hundred years of persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They knew what it meant to be hunted for what you believed. They were led, taught and encouraged by their remarkable pastor, André Trocmé, and his equally courageous wife, Magda. But what comes through again and again is their character and the down-to-earth, no-nonsense quality of their faith.
Many people in France allowed themselves to be fooled by the propaganda the Germans used to hide what was happening in the death camps. The people of Le Chambon did not. They simply did what had to be done, what they had been taught to do, what they believed Christ expected of them. They hid their Jewish neighbours, and the strangers who arrived at their doors, in homes, farms, boarding houses and schools, and they helped many escape across the border into Switzerland.
One evening in early 1943 sums up the whole story. André and Magda Trocmé had been invited to dinner by members of their church. Knowing that the busy couple often forgot such invitations, the hosts sent their daughter to the manse to remind them. But when the girl walked into the Trocmés' dining room, she found the police there, arresting her pastor. Word flew around the village: André Trocmé had been arrested.
And what did Magda do? She invited the two policemen to sit down and eat dinner with the family.
Her friends were later amazed, and some were upset with her. "How could you bring yourself to sit down and eat with these men who had come to take your husband away, perhaps to his death? How could you be so forgiving, so decent to them?"
Magda Trocmé always gave the same answer. "What are you talking about? It was dinner time. They were standing in my way. We were all hungry. The food was ready. What do you mean by such foolish words as 'forgiving' and 'decent'?"
That response was typical of the whole village. Again and again, the people of Le Chambon brushed aside praise. They would look Philip Hallie in the eye and say something like this: "How can you call us good? We were doing what had to be done. Things had to be done, that's all, and we happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it was the most natural thing in the world to help these people."
Hallie concluded that an outsider's moral praise was, to them, like a slightly uncomfortable wreath placed on their heads by a kind but foreign hand.
Takeaway: In the middle of the greatest crisis of their time, the people of Le Chambon did not wait to feel heroic. They did the next right thing, again and again, because their faith had already decided what they would do. "Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering towards slaughter" (Proverbs 24:11). The choices we make before a crisis shape how we act within it. What is your faith quietly preparing you to do?
Source: Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, drawing on Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.
Storms: The Sword of Orion and the 1998 Sydney to Hobart
The details of the rescue below follow Rob Mundle's account in Fatal Storm. On one point the original illustration needed correcting: the skipper who sailed past was cleared by the race's protest committee, not by the coroner.
The Sydney to Hobart is one of the world's great ocean yacht races. Every year, on Boxing Day, a fleet sets out from Sydney Harbour to sail more than 600 nautical miles down the coast of New South Wales and across Bass Strait to Hobart in Tasmania. But in 1998, the race was struck by disaster. A savage storm tore through the fleet. Most of the yachts were forced to retire, five boats sank, 55 sailors had to be rescued, and six people lost their lives.
One of the yachts caught in that storm was the 43-foot Sword of Orion. In the screaming wind and mountainous seas she was little more than a cork tossed on the ocean, fighting her way through enormous waves. Then the crew heard a roar like an approaching train. A huge breaking wave struck the yacht side-on and rolled her right over.
When the boat came upright again, the scene on board was devastating. One crewman, the British Olympic sailor Glyn Charles, had been swept away and was never found. The mast had broken from its footing and was threatening to spear straight through the hull. Equipment and rigging were smashed. Several of the crew were injured.
The crew sent out a mayday call and did everything they could to keep the yacht afloat. They braced the damaged hull to stop it collapsing, and they bailed out the water that kept seeping in. And then, bobbing like a cork on a violent sea, they waited for help.
They waited through the night and heard nothing. Then, in the dim light of early morning, one of the crew saw something he could hardly believe. Just 150 metres away was another yacht. He raced below to grab the flares and set one off. There was no response. He set off a second. No response. A third. Still nothing. Had they not seen? Could they not tell that this yacht was in desperate trouble? He fired a fourth flare and a fifth, but there was still no response. With sinking hearts, the crew of the Sword of Orion watched the other yacht sail away.
That yacht was the Margaret Rintoul II. Her skipper had in fact seen the flares, and he faced an agonising decision. One of the first rules of sailing is that you always go to the aid of a vessel in distress. But the Margaret Rintoul II was only just surviving the storm herself. Her engine was not working, which made manoeuvring in those atrocious conditions extremely difficult. To turn back and help the Sword of Orion would mean bringing his own boat side-on to the giant waves, with a real risk that she too would be rolled and left helpless. Weighing the danger to his own crew, the skipper made the heartbreaking decision to sail on. His yacht eventually reached safety.
After the race, the incident was investigated. In 2001 the race's protest committee cleared the skipper, accepting that the extreme weather and the failure of his engine made it reasonable not to turn back, although it noted shortcomings in his radio procedures. The coroner, for his part, made broader findings and criticisms about how the whole race had been managed.
Back on the Sword of Orion, the crew held on. Eventually they were spotted by a search plane. A short time after watching it fly off, they heard the drone of a helicopter. It lowered a cable into the raging sea. One by one, a crewman would jump overboard, grab the cable, clip himself on and be winched up to safety. The navy helicopter lifted three of the injured crew before it had to leave because it was running low on fuel; by Rob Mundle's account it arrived back at base with only about ten minutes of fuel to spare.
The remaining sailors had to wait out more hours in the cold and the terror of the storm. Then another helicopter arrived and lifted the rest of them to safety. Moments after the last crewman was rescued, the Sword of Orion was flung down the face of another huge wave and began to break apart.
When we are in a crisis, often the only thing we can do is hang on and wait for help. Sometimes, like the crew of the Margaret Rintoul II, we are so overwhelmed by our own crisis that we cannot help others in need. But in a healthy community, there will always be someone who can help us through.
Takeaway: Crises reveal how much we need one another. Some days we are the battered crew firing flares; some days we are the overwhelmed skipper who has nothing left to give; and some days we are the helicopter crew who can reach down and lift someone to safety. "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). Who around you is firing flares right now?
Source: Scott Higgins. Information on the race from Rob Mundle, Fatal Storm, with additional details from published reports on the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race.
Final thoughts
A mountain village that sheltered strangers without fuss, and a broken yacht whose crew held on until help came. These stories about crisis remind us that faith is often less about dramatic feelings and more about doing what has to be done, and that none of us gets through the storm alone.
Where do you need help to hold on, and where could you be someone else's help?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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