This morning’s word is The Rescue in the Deep.
The anchor verses are Psalm 3:3 and Psalm 103:19.
It was just before eight in the evening on July 1, in Lexington, Kentucky, when an eleven year old boy named Avory Woolery looked into an apartment pool and saw a man unconscious at the bottom, in seven feet of water. No one was doing anything. So Avory put on his goggles, went under, and pulled the man up from beneath the surface. Someone at the pool helped lift him onto the deck, and the man’s friend began CPR until help arrived. The man was rushed to the hospital in serious condition. Avory did not know him. Later he said it did not matter. He was not going to let another human being die that day.
This is the kind of moment that does not make the nightly news for long. But it changes everything for the one it saves, and it reminds the rest of us what it means to be human. What it means to love. What it means to be a hand to hold in the deep. A grown man was at the bottom of a pool, out of time, and the only person who moved was a boy who had not yet turned twelve. That should stop us for a moment. Courage did not wait for the qualified adult. It came in the shape of a child who refused to watch.
We all know what it is to be in the deep. The deep is not always water. Sometimes it is grief, the kind that takes your breath and makes it hard to get out of bed. Sometimes it is fear of the unknown, the kind that keeps you awake and makes your hands shake. Sometimes it is the weight of a decision you do not know how to make. Sometimes it is the loneliness of a night when sleep will not come and the silence feels like it could swallow you whole.
There is room for the honest question in the deep. There is room for the grief and the anger, for the prayer that comes out as a cry rather than a sentence. The deep does not silence these things. If anything it makes them louder. Some voices will tell you that a person of real faith should not feel the water closing in. Those voices are wrong. The deep is not a sign that GOD has left. It is simply where many honest people find themselves for a season. And GOD does not turn away from them there. HE meets us in them.
But there is also a hand reaching for us. There is a voice calling us back toward the shore. You, LORD, are a shield around me, the Psalm says, my glory, the One who lifts my head high. That is not a promise that we will never find ourselves in the deep. It is a promise that we will not face it alone.
The LORD has established HIS throne in heaven, another Psalm says, and HIS kingdom rules over all. That is not a claim that the world is already the way it should be. It is a claim that the world is never beyond the reach of GOD. The throne holds. So the deep cannot finally keep us.
And here is the hope underneath the hope. The deepest rescue is not that GOD wades into the water beside us, as much as HE does. It is that Jesus Christ went down into death itself and rose again on the third day. The deep has a bottom now. It cannot hold anyone HE has claimed.
Avory did not have to be there. He did not have to act. He was a child, and no one would have blamed him for freezing like everyone else did. But he moved. And in moving, he showed us in one small picture what love looks like when it refuses to stand on the shore.
So what does it mean to be that kind of hand for someone else? Sometimes it means going in when the trouble is right in front of you, the way Avory did. More often it is quieter than that. It means staying present when grief hits, without rushing to fix what cannot be fixed in a day. It means refusing to look away when someone feels alone. It means showing up again and again for the person who is struggling, long after the crisis has passed and the rest of the world has moved on. Most rescues are not dramatic. Most of them look like a person who kept showing up.
But hear this above all. Our own deepest rescue does not come from human hands. It comes from the One who holds all things, the One who does not stand on the shore and watch, but enters the deep with us and does not lose HIS grip. The deep is not the end of the story. The hand that holds us is.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
This Sunday’s Marc My Sabbath homily, A Hand to Hold in the Deep, carries this word further. Read it here.