The destroyer USS Doyle was on a rescue mission. As the ship churned through the Pacific Ocean at top speed in the dark of night, Captain W. Graham Claytor realized his ship was still over one hour away from his destination. Yet he knew something needed to be done to instill hope in the men clinging to survival.
As recounted in the book Indianapolis by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic, Claytor understood how bleak the men’s situation was. A Japanese submarine sunk the USS Indianapolis in the last days of World War II, after the Indianapolis had delivered the components of the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima.
After three and a half days in the water, the survivors’ prospects for rescue looked grim, and their hope waned. At that point, men had been dying due to starvation, dehydration, hallucinations, and sharks. Men became so delirious, their brains would trick them into seeing food under the ocean’s surface and dive down, never to return. Others swam off to some imagined island only to slip beneath the waves. Sharks attacked constantly, ripping one man at a time out of a floating group of survivors.
Of the 1,195 Indianapolis crew members, only 316 would survive.
Speeding through the night, Claytor ordered the ship’s 24-inch searchlight to be turned on and aimed into the sky, piercing the darkness for miles around. “Claytor wanted the men in the water to see the light, dig deep, and hang on just a little longer.”
And it worked.
One of the survivors, L.D. Cox, had assumed he and his group of men were doomed, “(b)ut when he saw Doyle’s beacon, it was as though a light switched on in heaven. Around him, fresh fire surged in the men, a sudden burning desire to live.”
Seven hundred years before the first Christmas, God offered hope for people who believe and trust in Him. Through the prophet Isaiah, God foretold of the birth of Jesus Christ as a reason to hang on through the dark times because help was coming.
Isaiah wrote “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned” because “to us a child is born” (Isaiah 9:2,6). With Christ’s birth, God switched on “the light of the world,” so that whoever follows Jesus “will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).
How does Jesus provide you hope, so you can dig deep and hang on, when you are enveloped by darkness?