Love That Leaves the Shore

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 clipped the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D.C., and plunged into the ice-covered Potomac River during a blinding snowstorm. Of the seventy-nine people on board, only six initially survived, clinging to the wreckage in water barely above freezing. Hundreds of bystanders lined the shore, watching in horror as a helicopter lowered a lifeline again and again. Then Priscilla Tirado lost her grip on the rescue line and slipped beneath the surface.

Lenny Skutnik, a twenty-eight-year-old office assistant at the Congressional Budget Office, had been standing among those onlookers. He was nobody's idea of a hero — just a government employee on his way home from work. But when he saw Tirado go under, he stripped off his coat and boots and plunged into the frozen Potomac. He swam through chunks of ice, seized the drowning woman, and pulled her to shore. Two weeks later, President Reagan honored him at the State of the Union address, beginning a tradition that continues to this day.

Every person on that riverbank felt compassion. Many surely whispered prayers. But only Skutnik's love got wet.

The Apostle John put it plainly: "Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth" (1 John 3:18). Genuine love is not a sentiment we feel from safe ground. It is a decision that carries us into someone else's suffering — costly, cold, and unmistakably real.