This morning’s word is Six Days.
The anchor readings are Daniel 6 and Matthew 6:34.
A Nepali guide named Dawa Sherpa, fifty-two years old, was found alive this week on Mount Everest after being missing for six days. He had paused to rest during the descent at around twenty-four thousand feet, just above Camp 3, where the air is thin enough that oxygen does not behave the way the body expects it to. His climbing party moved on. He did not catch back up to them, and somewhere in the hours after they last saw him, the search began. Helicopters went out. The official effort reportedly faced delays. Six days passed in which everyone who knew anything about Everest knew what the odds of survival at that altitude looked like.
He was found by accident, in a way. A cleaning crew was closing up the routes at the end of the climbing season, and he was among the last climbers still on the mountain. They were not searching for a lost guide. They were doing the ordinary work of clearing what hundreds of climbers had left behind and dismantling the ropes and ladders, and while they worked, they came across Dawa Sherpa on the Khumbu Icefall, crawling under his own power toward Base Camp. He was airlifted to a hospital with frostbite, but otherwise reportedly in good health. His family had already begun his funeral rites. Six days at altitude no one should survive alone. Found by people who were not looking for him. Moving toward home on his own when they spotted him.
The story is striking enough on its own merits, but read against this morning’s Scripture it carries something deeper than a news report can name.
For six days there was almost nothing that Dawa Sherpa could control. He had no power over the decision of his climbing party to keep descending without him. He could not speed the response of the official search. He had no way to deliver justice on whatever combination of circumstances had left him alone at twenty-four thousand feet, and he could not see the full picture of why he was where he was. Three things that Katie Hauck names this morning as belonging to GOD alone were laid open in his situation. Control. Justice. Understanding. None of them were his to wield, and so he did the only thing left to him. He moved. He kept descending. He kept doing the small ordinary work of putting one body part in front of the other in the thin air toward a destination he could not see. He was not summoning rescue or earning survival. He was doing what Pastor Segun Oduyebo names this morning as the substance of real influence and character: ordinary things done with extraordinary grace.
This is the strange shape of the life that Scripture this morning is describing. We do not stand because we have earned standing. Ignatius writes that if GOD were to reward us according to our works, we would cease to be. We stand because grace is given. And the right response to that gift is not the manufacturing of religious accomplishment but the steady release of what we have been gripping that was never ours. We were made to reflect HIM, not to be HIM. Reaching for control over what we cannot control, demanding justice we are not equipped to administer, and insisting on understanding that has not been promised to us is what Ignatius calls the sour leaven, the kind of religious life that produces exhaustion and bitterness in equal measure.
The new leaven, Ignatius says, is Jesus Christ HIMSELF. We are not just made into bread that GOD eats. We are made into the leaven that goes into the bread other people need. The risen Christ does not stop with our own resurrection. The risen Christ makes the released soul into something that nourishes whatever it touches, and the way this happens is not through striving. It happens through release. We let go of the sovereignty that was never ours, and the leaven moves through what is left.
Daniel in Babylon is the picture Pastor Oduyebo holds up this morning, and it is the right one. Daniel was an exile in a foreign empire. He had no power to change his circumstances, no way to deliver justice on the empire that had taken him from his home, and no clear understanding of the long sweep of history that had landed him in a foreign court. What he did was pray at his open window three times a day, serve the king with diligence, and live with such consistent integrity that his enemies could find no fault in him to use against him. His character was not a performance. His character was what remained when his hands released what was not his to hold.
A pastoral note before the close. The mountain has killed many people over the years, and this same season took the lives of seven other climbers and guides in the Everest and Makalu regions. The story of Dawa Sherpa is not a promise that GOD always rescues those who are lost. If you have lost someone to a mountain, or to a long silence, or to a search that did not find what it was looking for, the daily word is not asking you to believe that their loss was a failure of faithfulness. The teaching is not that release earns rescue. The teaching is that release is its own kind of freedom. Whether or not the cleaning crew comes, the one who has let go of what was never theirs to manage has already received something worth more than the rescue they were demanding.
What in your life is too big for you to control, judge, or fully understand? Where might you stop trying to manage what was never yours, and start doing the small ordinary thing in front of you? The One who tends what HE has planted is already paying attention.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.