Unsinkable

At Whit's End, Emily Jones, Whit, and Jason Whittaker listen to an old recorded tape on which an elderly woman named Nina Lee tells the story of how the shop's piano came to be there. Her story begins in April 1912, aboard the Titanic.

Young Nina has boarded the great ship with her father, Reverend Hankins, though the voyage is shadowed by a painful argument between them: her father worries she has become too consumed with the material pleasures of the world. Nina has also befriended Henry Lee, a young messenger boy on the crew. When the ship strikes an iceberg, Henry is summoned to the bridge, and Nina slips along to listen. They overhear the ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, report a long gash in the hull and five or six flooded compartments. When the captain asks if the ship could sink, Andrews answers, "No. It will sink" - within an hour, perhaps two. The captain orders the passengers wakened and calmly brought on deck, and a distress call sent.

Instead of heading for the lifeboats, Nina goes looking for her father, with Henry at her side. Their cabin is empty except for a note saying he has gone searching for her. At the wireless office they learn something terrible: the lifeboats can only hold half the people on board. Henry pleads with Nina to get on a boat, but she refuses to leave without her father, and Henry hurries off to find his brothers. Searching the flooding lower decks, Nina is nearly drowned when water bursts through a wall, but a hand pulls her up into the stairwell - her father has found her.

On deck, Reverend Hankins wraps Nina in her coat and leads her to a lifeboat, but he will not board. He tells her he has two roles: he is her father, but he is also a pastor, and as a shepherd of God's flock he must help as many women and children off the ship as God allows. Nina, he says, has another calling of her own, and the greatest gift she can give him is to walk in the Lord's ways. As her boat is lowered, he tells her, "I'll see you on the other side."

From the water, Nina and the other survivors watch the glowing ship tilt, hear the band playing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" - the very hymn from that morning's service - and listen in horror as everything aboard slides down the deck. The crewmen dare not row back toward the people in the water for fear of being swamped. The great "unsinkable" ship breaks in two and disappears, and Nina quietly prays the Lord's Prayer for her father. At dawn the rescue ship Carpathia arrives and carries the survivors to New York.

Nina is raised by her father's cousin Alfred, who gives her every fashionable thing a young woman could want. But like the Titanic itself, she carries a deep wound below the surface. On her eighteenth birthday she boards a train west with no destination in mind, and when the train stops for the night in a small town called Odyssey, she steps off cold, coatless, and weeping. There she is found by Mayor Harmon Fillmore and his wife Lucy, who take her into their brand-new Mayor's Mansion. One night of hospitality becomes three, and soon Nina settles in Odyssey as the Fillmores' live-in housekeeper, finally feeling she belongs somewhere.

Years later, a letter reminds Nina of a piano her father had placed in storage in New York - an instrument he intended to be used to encourage worship. She retrieves it, takes up playing again after many years, and leads Friday-night hymn sings at the mansion that draw over a hundred townspeople, often including "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Something hopeful comes alive in her: she is at last doing the work her father hoped she would do. When the busy gatherings grow wearisome for the aging Fillmores, Nina has an idea, and the mansion is reopened as the Fillmore Recreation Center, a gathering place for the whole community. Lucy, inspired by Nina's freedom from material things, finds she delights in her smaller, simpler home.

At the ribbon cutting, a man calls out Nina's name - it is Henry, alive. He tells her what he came to say: as the ship went down, he was thrown into the freezing water without a life belt, and it was Reverend Hankins who found him, insisted Henry take his own life belt, and urged him, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved." Her father prayed with him before the sea took him, and Henry survived the night on an overturned lifeboat. God met him in the darkest night of his life through her father's sacrifice, and Henry went on to become a pastor himself. He also finds himself thoroughly smitten with Nina, and six months later they marry - right there in the recreation center, carving into the reception hall the coordinates where the Titanic sank, so the lost passengers could be part of their special day. A husband who loved the Lord, Nina says, was her father's last gift to her.

Back in the present, Emily realizes those are the very coordinates carved into the wall of the Whit's End storage room - the building that was once the recreation center. Moved by the story, Whit reflects that life is meant to be spent not chasing material wealth but doing the things that matter to God, and he announces an idea for that storage room: a place to help kids discover their spiritual gifts and God's calling on their lives. After all, he says, that's his calling.