An Anchor for the Soul

Shortly after 9:00 p.m. on July 24, 2002, miners working in the Quecreek Mine just south of Pittsburgh broke through the mine wall into Saxman Mine which operators abandoned in 1950 and had since filled with water. Though they made it to higher ground, nine miners remain trapped and standing in four feet of 50-degree water. The men huddled together to keep warm. Later, they wrote last words to family members on scraps of paper and placed them in a pail. Then, the men tethered themselves together so all would be found if they drowned.

This account paints a pretty bleak picture and left alone the miners would have had no hope. However, working tirelessly for over three days, rescuers using water pumps, air pumps, and mining equipment retrieved each of the nine miners.

You can bet that the view from the stretcher as rescuers carried each miner to a waiting ambulance differed radically from the view they shared of a flooded mine shaft 240 feet below the surface. From one vantage point they rested in the knowledge of rescue and from the other they were surrounded by dark, dirt, water, and the inevitable.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know that our family recently lost our youngest daughter to an auto accident that tragically took the lives of three people. The place where I now live is just about as cold and dark and potentially as hopeless as the flooded Quecreek Mine.

Left to my own devices, my loss, my emotions, my inability to see beyond my catastrophic grief, I see no way out, no future. There is a pain in my soul that makes the rest of my life seem like the watery liquid at the bottom of a glass of soda after the ice has melted. Everything that gave me pleasure has lost its appeal. On some days, the best I can hope for is getting to evening and a couple of Tylenol PM tabs and closing my eyes. But, even then, my sleep is distorted with uneasy dreams. My grief is impossible to adequately describe and equally impossible for someone who has not experienced it to imagine. None of this is unusual, but shouldn’t my faith in Jesus somehow mitigate the pain?

The short answer is “no.” Nothing in Scripture suggests that my faith will make the experience of my loss any easier. Believers and those outside the faith alike are created as emotional beings and equally lack the ability to make sense of some emotions. The depth of the pain does not differentiate my experience from outsiders, but my knowledge of rescue does – the difference is hope.

In this mortal existence, I will never be the same. My daughter is gone and while I breathe with this body, I’ll never see her. Nothing can fix that injury and I will always bear that scar. Even as time wears away on my grief, things will never be the same.

But I know the rest of the story. Even though my grief at this point does not allow me to feel the love that Jesus has for me, I know that nothing can separate me from His love. I cannot fathom the reason for my loss, but I know that God is sovereign and this train-wreck somehow works towards His glory and my good. Despite the fact that these eyes will never again set their gaze on my daughter’s face, I will see her again. I have hope.

Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where Jesus, who went before us, has entered on our behalf.

[Hebrews 6:17-20a]

This is not just any kind of hope, rather it is hope in the Living God – the God who infinite and unfettered by any limitation of His creation, the God who is personal and desires to have a relationship with me, the God who is unchangeable, the God who is eternal, the God who is present everywhere. He is all knowing, wise, truthful, good, loving, merciful, holy, orderly, righteous, just, beautiful, and much more.

While this hope does not alleviate the intensity of my grief and even though I’m still free-falling through the dark, I know my circumstance is not bottomless. How one could face my grief without a firm and secure anchor for their soul, without the hope of my God, eludes me.