And out of the mystery, hope emerges

In the past several weeks, we all watched the extraordinary rescue of twelve young boys in Thailand and their soccer coach.

The media doubted they could be found at all.  Only their abandoned bicycles provided a clue to where they had gone into the flooded cave.  It did not appear it was going to end well. Given the passage of time, rising flood waters and more on the way, even the experts doubted they would be found alive.

But they were. 

And then, teams of specialists, scientists, and navy SEALS from around the world, worked to get them out alive, these boys weakened by ten days without food and limited possibly contaminated water, many of whom did not even know how to swim.

But the highly skilled international rescue teams wouldn't give up, even in the face of overwhelming forces against them.

Why?  Not for the adventure, or challenge, or heroism, or headlines, but because of a God-rooted basic truth:  Life is sacred and precious.

Against the limitations of time and the threat of even more torrential rain, the rescuers pursued deliverance.   Day after day, the sheer odds against them rose like the waters in that cave. People without faith hoped for the best.  The rest of the world prayed for the impossible.  Because, then again, "odds" never include the intervention of God in an equation. 

When a highly skilled diver drowned in the pursuit, the others were even more determined to bring out each boy alive, the children having been underground at that point for seventeen days until they all emerged, having endured so many days of deep darkness they had to cover their eyes.

It was, as the Wall Street Journal stated, "one of the most extraordinary rescues the world has seen, involving thousands of divers, engineers, military and support staff."

And as every one realized, from every worldview, it took something outside of human effort to succeed.

Just as quickly as the last boy and their coach emerged from their watery prison, before even the cheering of the crowds faded, the unexplainable was explained away.  A top story of the day on July 12 in the New York Times was entitled:  "I still can't believe it worked,"  Inside the Thai soccer team's rescue:  floating stretchers, anti-anxiety pills and no small amount of luck.

I shook my head....no small amount of luck.  What does it take to acknowledge God's hand?

The article continued with a quote from a Thai army commander:  "The most important piece of the rescue was good luck.  So many things could have gone wrong, but somehow we managed to get the boys out."

But somehow...

The definition of luck is chance, accidental, something entirely random and otherwise unexplainable, unexpected, unaccountable, at exactly the right time.

Things like that don't "just happen."  The limited margins of the explainable leave no room for mystery, wonder, or transcendence. Luck is impersonal and random.  But supernatural is not spelled that way.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name,
                  you are Mine.
When you pass through the waters
          I will be with you;
and through the rivers,
       they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire
             you shall not be burned,
     and the flame shall not consume you.
...Because you are precious in My eyes,
and honored,
              and I love you."

                                   Isaiah 43. 1-2, 4

The daring reality of His Presence shocks us by His power in it.

As Ted Loder says in his book Guerillas of Grace: "Yet, prayer is always against the odds set by logic, by scientism, by realism...a gut deep, intuitive refusal to accept the odds or to calculate too closely with the limits of the possible or the sneakiness of grace....[Praying] opens the one who prays to broader dimensions of reality than he or she may have entertained before.

"Some part of us is taken captive or set free, and that shift changes the world a little."

Even in a cave in remote Thailand.

Even in whatever you face today.

And perhaps God did it that improbable,
                       impossible way
to put wonder in the wake of the story,
to make people doubt their doubts,
to hear the supernatural resounding in the air.
The last page has been turned,
the instruments have eased playing,
           but there is not silence,
just His glory too thick to breathe.
There will always be excuses and explanations
             for what cannot be explained,
the beauty,
the unexpected,
and a peek into the eternal.