AFAD Van Kurtama, by permission, Wikipedia, Search and Rescue, Turkey
We will return to the 33 and their first hours and days underground, and to the many things taking place that are as parables to their story, but what of those on the top?
The mining officials did nothing all that first night while the dust continued to pour out of the earth. The few feeble attempts to enter and size up the situation were cruelly hampered. No one alerted the government or the media or the families, at first. One of the first to get news was the girlfriend of a miner who was married to another woman … the girlfriend had a relative who had heard from someone else that the mine had failed.
Word began to spread, and family members all began to gather at the site. One woman wasn’t even sure which mine (there are several) was the one where her husband worked and hoped his job was elsewhere. The first news bulletins, “trapped, with no way out,” was something mining families knew all about. They knew the stories of men left to die in caverns too deep and inaccessible to bother to try to rescue them.
Quite a few of the miners had been trapped before by rockfalls that took a day or more to clear, usually only a matter of hours with front-loaders and truck. This was not that, but no one on the surface knew it yet.
Before long, the wives and mothers, children, siblings of those 33 men began to gather. First, just one, then a handful, then more and more as news traveled up and down Chile and around the world. Those families just would not tolerate the inactivity. “Do something!”, which is often a plaintive cry, was more than that at San Jose. “Do something!” Their pleas began to rise into a riot of insistence … “Do something!”
There was nothing that could be done. All the veterans of mining experience knew it, and within days, as we will see, they had better than good reason to “abandon all hope.”
Is there even one person in your life for whom you have abandoned hope, or nearly? Maybe by faith you still pray, still keep a positive outlook, but … I will speak of myself … am I digging? Am I drilling? Am I determined, “I am going to reach them, by the Spirit of God!”
This is doctrinally “tricky.” It is God Who will help them! He will ride on the wings of darkness and come to them! He will thunder from heaven, His voice will resound! (Psalm 18) At the same time, He told us to pray, to persevere, and if we stay the course for ourselves, certainly for others as well. If He gave them to us to love, surely they are given into our spiritual watch-care as well, and if we have faith that they may lack, we “Do something!”
In the end, the outcome in which we rejoice for those 33 was affected by experts. I am certainly not an “expert” in prayer and intercession, but you and I might have more expertise than we know or have been putting to use.
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