Article 4:
What Didn't Sink on the Titanic, Page 1
By Kraig Kroeker, As Told To Deborah Hedstrom-Page

The movie brought my past to life. For years I knew that my great grandfather had survived the sinking of the Titanic, but little else. Now, via a theater's big screen and its surround-sound system, I no longer had to imagine my mother's grandfather caught in the middle of the disaster. In digitally mastered color and Dolby sound, I'd seen the gigantic iceberg, heard it scrape the gilded ship, smelled the northern ocean, and felt the luxury boat shudder as it began to sink.

"That flick was too great."

"Leonardo DiCaprio wasn't so bad either!"

"Personally, I think the movie lasted too long."

The comments of my fellow college students brought me back to the present, and I shoved aside the hard questions starting to take shape in my thoughts. Better to stick with what little my mother had told me about the man whose blood flowed through my veins. "He was a Christian, a missionary in China," she had told me. "But all I really remember is sitting in a kind old man's lap."

Though a mysterious figure, I'd felt good about having a Christian missionary great-grandfather. When I decided to leave my job and go to Bible college to become a pastor, I thought of it as continuing a godly tradition. But the questions stirred up by the recent Titanic movie gnawed at my supposedly rich Christian background. Now that I'd seen a reenactment of the luxury liner's demise and learned of the class-oriented society of 1912, I couldn't escape the question: How had my great-grandfather survived?

He wouldn't have had enough money to travel in the ship's upper classes. Wouldn't he have been locked down in steerage until all the lifeboats were gone? Was he one of the people on board who had resorted to deception or violence to save himself?

I had no answers and in my practical way, I went back to homework, classes and my part-time job. But the hype over the movie didn't die quickly. For weeks it stayed a top seller in theaters. Many of my classmates saw it more than once. They even wrote papers about it for their classes. And each time I heard another comment, my ugly questions clamored for answers.

Though my past now nagged at me, I didn't think to pray about it. Yet God knew my inner struggle and questions about my godly heritage. He also knew the truth and in His grace, He let me discover it too.