For the last twelve hours or so I’ve been watching the rescue of thirty-three Chilean miners who have been trapped two thousand feet below ground since August 5. It’s been without a doubt one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed and a testament to all that is good about humanity—our compassion for those in danger, our ingenuity for solutions, our love for one another, and our faith that God will see us through even the most unimaginable circumstances. This is a celebration, and rightly so.
I’ve kept up with these men. I’ve seen the news reports and the You-Tube videos, those grainy-green images of ordinary souls choosing to make the hell they were marooned in soft around the edges through friendship. By all accounts, it was their hope and faith that kept them alive. Hope that their fellow man would find a way to rescue them. Faith that God would help them persevere.
It’s their hope and faith that have captured me, not simply their condition. There is hell upon this earth in many places—some would say most places. Places where the stories are not recounted by television reporters and the shadows are not illuminated by floodlights. These men are different. They’ve told their own story and chased away their own shadows through the power of a faith that glowed even brighter in the black tunnels that were their prison. Yet they have done even more than that.
These are people who were thousands of miles away and thousands of feet below, and yet they still managed to somehow hold up a mirror in front of themselves through which I can see myself.
I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m sure you’ve paused at least once in the past few days to wonder what you would have done in those circumstances. How you would have survived and what would have happened to your faith. Would you find a strength and a trust you never thought you possessed, or would what you possessed be snatched away and lost?
My answer? I don’t know. I would like to think I would resemble Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to be rescued and the one who said, “I was with God and with the devil, and I reached out for God.” Or that I would be like Mario Lopez, the tenth rescued and the one who knelt beneath a wide sky to offer a prayer of thanks.
I would like to think I would have joined in their belief that they did not number themselves as thirty-three but instead thirty-four, because God was down there with them. That I would emerge from that hell with my chin up and my chest out, just like they have.
I would like to think that.
And maybe it would be so. Maybe I would prove myself worthy of the challenge God had given me and rise up a better man.
I have never been in a mine, but my life has had its own share of dark and silent places that offered little chance of rescue. I’ve felt that hopelessness consume me. Watched as my strength and faith faded along with the bright light and the wide sky. I will say God preserved me and others rescued me. But whether or not I emerged a better man is a question I cannot answer. The body may be brought up out of the pit, but a bit of you is always left behind and a bit of that darkness always follows. Many of those men may find that to be true, and that is a shame.
In some ways I worry more for them now. I think of the clamor that will surround them and the hounding they will receive, all for the chance of a headline or a news special. That, I think, is a bigger shame.
But I will thank them now and always. Their bravery and their faith, their steadfast hope, has illumined the cracks in my own. I will work on those things. I must.
Because there are many dark places under the wide sky.
