Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, April 14, 1865, from a glass slide by T.M.McAlister of New York, featured image, Wikipedia, by permission
Long ago, when radio was still in its glory, there was a broadcast entitled, “You Were There!” which took the listener back to historical events of interest and importance. The Lincoln Assassination was one; the signing of the Declaration of Independance was another, and the fate of Nathan Hale another.
If that program, which later aired on television, were still around, producers might try to take us back to the day that a slab of rock, twice the size of the Empire State Building, broke off inside a mountain just where and just when 33 miners were at work, waiting to be transported up to a … very late … lunch hour. A book has been written, an official account, of that event, “Deep, Down, Dark,” and it is an extraordinary read. Even knowing the outcome, one feels the shock, the horror, the confusion, the desperation, the despair that those men felt, all in the same hour, of discovering that no, there really, truly, was no way out. They couldn’t go up and out, or down to a different exit, and that slab of rock, that chunk of mountain, was there, right there, blocking the road and the way out. They could touch it; they could not scale it or go around it.
The story, as told in the book, was narrated without excess pathos; it was unnecessary. Just the account as it unfolded, in the memory of the men who endured it, in their words and culled from their emotions, was as dramatic, more dramatic, than any hype could have been. One could trace one’s own fears and doubts and unbelief reading that account, and it is painful and beautiful, both.
Beautiful because they said, from the very beginning, a few of them said, after a headcount, that there were not 33 of them, there were 34. They were not alone. That faith slipped, like rock dust off the sheer face of the slab, at times, but we understand that.
What does their ordeal have to do with us? Two things. One, we know men and women and even children who are trapped as deep, emotionally or spiritually, as they were, which is to say, no way out unless God delivers them, and two, while rescue efforts began … slowly … above ground, we can begin to dig them out, those we love and care for, with our prayers. The only guarantee we have is that … God loves them, too, and that He hears our prayers. It is enough. If we care about them, if we care deeply, it is our assurance that He cares and has involved us in their rescue.
Our concentrated prayer efforts begin on the anniversary of the day of that collapse, Monday, August 5th, and lasting through October 12, the last day of their confinement.
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