Rescued!

I’m sitting here with rapt attention watching the Chilean miners finally get rescued. This is an excruciatingly slow process. One by one, the capsule is lowered and then a single man is brought up who has been trapped for nearly 70 days.

When the first guy was brought up, there were cheers and tears. By all accounts, this guy (and all the others) should have been dead. But they weren’t. It was an amazing miracle that kept them from dying, and some amazing work that drilled the hole and got them out so quickly.

My twitter friend, @BoLane, tweeted “The Chilean rescuers will have 33 times to rejoice tonight. That’s like the equivalent of winning 33 Super Bowls in a couple days!”

This is, indeed, teamwork at its finest!

For over two months, a large group of people have been united by a common vision—to get these guys out alive. There were many different tasks involved (drilling, getting food and air in, support, strategy, communications, etc…), but only one goal. And it was life and death. The presence of the first rescued man’s son told the story: A young boy weeping when his once-thought-to-be-dead dad was brought out alive. What if that was my son; what if that man was me? I can only imagine my gratitude to those who rescued me with single-hearted determination to do all they could to bring me up alive.

I wonder what would happen if our churches were like this? There are dying people all around us, and we have access to the resources to potentially bring them life. There are a lot of us, too. But a lot of us doesn’t necessarily equal success. In fact, we tend to make a lot of busy work…a lot of religious red-tape…and a lot of action without impact.

How broken are we that there are people who haven’t met God? How much intensity is there in us that our world needs Jesus? How much are we willing to sacrifice to work as a team in order to successfully help others into the light?

If we were as single-minded in our vision to rescue lost souls as these people are to bring out trapped miners, I think we’d see something even more amazing than what I’m witnessing right now!