{"id":5184,"date":"2026-01-26T10:38:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T15:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5184"},"modified":"2026-01-26T10:38:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T15:38:33","slug":"passing-the-lifeline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/26\/passing-the-lifeline\/","title":{"rendered":"Passing the Lifeline"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>
\u00a0
All his life, Arland D. Williams, Jr., had been afraid of the water.

As an undergrad cadet at the Citadel, where he was known as Chub, he had had to pass a water-safety and swimming test.\u00a0Chub was afraid he wouldn’t be able to push through his fears.

He did.

But the biggest test of his life came on January 13, 1982, when the 46-year-old bank examiner\u00a0boarded Air Florida Flight 90 on a bitterly cold, snowy afternoon\u00a0in Washington, D.C.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

The Boeing 737, its wings shrouded in ice, never really got airborne.\u00a0It brushed the top of the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac, killing a half dozen motorists, then smashed nose-first into the ice-capped\u00a0river.\u00a0Almost all of its 79 passengers and crew died upon impact.

Horrified witnesses\u00a0watched as the shattered fuselage vanished from sight.\u00a0Only the tail remained afloat.\u00a0\u00a0

Then, one by one, six survivors appeared.

They all were in shock.\u00a0They all had swum past the bodies of dead friends, spouses, and seatmates.\u00a0They all had broken limbs.\u00a0They all were succumbing to the chill of the water, and could barely hang on to the tail.\u00a0

Would-be rescuers on the shore tried to figure out how to reach them.

After 20 agonizing minutes, a rescue chopper appeared.\u00a0As\u00a0a national TV audience watched, its trained crew dropped a lifeline right into the hands of the man who appeared (as they later described him) to be the most likely to survive.

It was Chub.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

He immediately handed the ring to one of the women in the water.\u00a0The chopper lifted her to safety, then deposited her on the shore.\u00a0\u00a0

The chopper made repeated stops just above the aircraft tail, which was rapidly filing with water.\u00a0Each time, Williams caught the ring.\u00a0And each time he gave it to someone else.

The other five survivors all made it to safety.\u00a0The last time the helicopter circled over the jagged opening in the pack ice, this time to retrieve Williams, it was too late.\u00a0The tail was gone.\u00a0And so was Chub.\u00a0

In an eloquent 2007 article on the nature of heroism, Christopher McDougall wrote:\u00a0“Who was he?\u00a0 But far more perplexing: Why<\/em> was he?

“Why would anyone put the lives of strangers ahead of his own? He couldn’t even see the faces of the people he was saving, because they were on the opposite side of the wreckage, yet he made a sacrifice for them that their best friends might have refused.”\u00a0

Frank Webster, who had been one of Chub’s friends at the Citadel, thinks he knows the answer.\u00a0

“Always take care of your people first,” he said.\u00a0That was their Citadel training. “That’s an unbreakable code.\u00a0You go last.\u00a0Your people go first.”\u00a0As McDougall put\u00a0it, “Chub didn’t have to see the survivors across the wreckage from him to know they weren’t strangers.\u00a0They were family.”\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
Darwinists \u2013 who have concluded that humanity, just to be here, has endured an incredibly long series of \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d crossroads \u2013 have always struggled to explain heroic self-sacrifice.
\u00a0
Of what personal value is it to donate a kidney to a complete stranger? Why do Go Fund Me campaigns raise tens of thousands of dollars for families whose houses have burned down, even though the donors will never hear a personal \u201cthank-you\u201d? Why would Williams keep passing the lifeline to the opposite side of the wreckage, surrendering his own life in the process?
\u00a0
If we see things through the lens of Christianity, however, self-sacrifice makes sense.
\u00a0
That\u2019s because we\u2019re called to abandon ourselves to the God who, through Jesus, sacrificed himself for others \u2013 and beckons us to do the same.
\u00a0
\u201cThis is how we\u2019ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for others, and not just be out for ourselves\u201d (I John 3:16).

Every day, we have opportunities to die for someone else.

We give up our own life whenever we advance another person’s\u00a0agenda at the expense of our own. Whenever we let a teammate\u00a0take the credit for a shared victory. Whenever we decide to go last, and let other people go first.\u00a0
\u00a0
You can still drive across what used to be called the 14th<\/sup> Street Bridge over the Potomac River. It\u2019s now known as the Arland D. Williams, Jr., Memorial Bridge.\u00a0

You may not get a bridge named after you.

But your decision to help someone else make it through the day\u00a0will, in a small way, change their life \u2013 and change the world. \u00a0\u00a0

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0All his life, Arland D. Williams, Jr., had been afraid of the water. As an undergrad cadet at the Citadel, where he was known as Chub, he had had to pass a water-safety and swimming test.\u00a0Chub was afraid he wouldn’t be able to push through his fears. He did. But the biggest… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[306,104,208],"class_list":["post-5184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-heroism","tag-love","tag-sacrifice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5186,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions\/5186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}