The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald
On November10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald left the port in Superior, Wisconsin, and waslater sunk in an early November gale on the big lake. The tragedy took thelives of all twenty-nine hands on the ship. As Gordon Lightfoot penned in hisfamous ballad, “Superior is it said, never gives up her dead, when the gales ofNovember come early.”
By December1975, Lightfoot wrote and recorded the song in memoriam to the sailors lost in the wreck. As someone who grew up close to the port on Lake Superior where “the Fitz’” departed from, I will play or hear this song many times over the course of this week.
The musical and narrative crescendo throughout the song peaks on the line, “and later that night when his lights went out of sight, came the wreck of the EdmundFitzgerald.” What follows is a stripped back instrumentation, and Lightfoot delivers a foundation-shaking question in a soft voice: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
While we continue to commemorate the sinking of the Fitz’ every year on the anniversary of the storm, one day the children of the sailors will be gone, and the memorial services will grow smaller and smaller. Yet the question will remain one that has been fought over for thousands of years: if God is good and all powerful, why do bad things happen?
The formulation that Lightfoot puts together does not read like a philosophical argument meant to be the sort of “gotcha” that is often put to Christians to disprove God. It reads like a survivor in mourning, desperately searching forGod’s goodness in the face of extreme tragedy. This is a search that will be experienced by billions of people around the globe until the Lord returns.
What answer is there to give? The truth is that God’s love is steadfast, enduring forever; it is ever present for his people. So, it was right there on the ship. I do not know the status of each of the twenty-nine souls on board the Edmund Fitzgerald that night, but for any who are in Christ, their fear should have been mixed with something else, hope.
Knowing something to be true does not always mean it remains easy to cling to, just as the line in the song points out. The love of God exists, but it doesn’t feel like it’s anywhere close when devastation comes knocking. Hence the question,“Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
Tragedy in Scripture
InScripture, we might turn to the maritime example of Jonah, particularly Jonah’s poetic prayer in chapter 2. Here Jonah cries out in his distress of being thrown overboard and being driven away from God. He says, “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me” (Jonah 2:3). The situation seems to match the sinking of the Fitz’, but it doesn’t connect well because Jonah’s turmoil is driven by the fact that he was actively disobeying and fleeing from God.
In the Gospel accounts, Jesus walks on water and calms storms that frighted experienced sailors on multiple occasions. In fact, this is where we find the disciples asking the same sort of question that Gordon Lightfoot sings. In Matthew8:23–27, we see Jesus asleep in the boat when the waves are threatening to capsize it. The disciples wake Jesus and shout, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing” (Matt. 8:25). What happens next is what we all would hope would happen when we cry out for help. Jesus stands up, asks why they have so little faith, and turns the raging tempest to a sea of glass with a word.
This is not the outcome we often get in the storms that pummel our lives. Jesus echoesJonah in that the storm ceases raging in a moment at the command of its Maker.For the disciples, this causes them to wonder, “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and sea obey him?” (Matt. 8:27).
So, we know that he can calm the seas, and we know that he has. So why doesn’t he do so every time? That’s really what someone in crisis wants to know. The true answer, though in the moment of suffering it’s unsatisfying, is that when sin entered the world in Genesis 3, creation itself became hostile towards us. The work that was meant to be easy and joyful now produces not just weeds, but thorns and thistles that sit like barbed wire amidst our desired harvest. Can we not extrapolate beyond that to see the pests that eat the plants, the predators that hunt our livestock, and weather which makes it hard or dangerous to workin the elements?
Of course, the question may arise, if sin is the root, why do God’s people still suffer like this? For that we turn to the most famous character in Scripture to exemplify suffering, Job. In Job 38:1, it says, “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said . . . .” What follows is a series of questions fromJob 38:2–40:2. These questions lay out the difference between man and God in all of God’s mighty works in creating and sustaining the world. Job’s confession comes in 42:2–6, which ends in Job repenting for questioning theLORD’s purposes because they are above and beyond what we can know, let alone understand.
Hope in Suffering
So, in the end, suffering happens because of the fall. Are we to just deal with it and stop asking why? That’s not the end, at least that isn’t an end for those in Christ, because God doesn’t just allow suffering; he steps into it. The suffering servant in Isaiah 52–53 is a prophecy of Christ’s sufferings. In it,God says,
"He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief… Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed."
The end for the believer who is suffering is not eternal turmoil, since Christ came, suffered, and died so that we could be forgiven our sin. He also suffered so that he could bring peace and healing from the suffering we have in this world. He is able to comfort us because he identifies with us in our sufferings. He gives us hope as the God of all comfort, and gives us the Holy Spirit to depend more on him when face troubles of various kinds.
Where does the love of God go, when the waves turn the minutes to hours? It’s right there, wherever you are. It flows from the God who suffered to his people, that they would have comfort in the harshest of storms.