Everybody Thinks Somebody Else Will
The word for Friday, August 28, 2026 is Everybody Thinks Somebody Else Will.
The anchor verses are Isaiah 59:16 and Psalm 3:3.
On the eleventh of June a college student named Jameson Mallon-Echols was driving to a friend's house in Houston.
He is a junior, an offensive lineman and a captain on the football team at the South Dakota School of Mines, and he studies mechanical engineering.
He watched a car coming the other way lose control, cross the median, and wreck.
He pulled over. He called 911. He ran at it.
There were three teenagers inside. He helped two of them out. The third was the driver, sixteen years old, badly hurt and pinned in the seat.
While Mallon-Echols was working on him, fire came up underneath the seat.
He took off his shirt and used it against the flames. Another man, whose name is not in any of the reporting, worked the seat belt loose. Between them they got the boy partway out and his legs were still caught in the wreck, so they pulled pieces of metal away until he came free, and then they carried him off.
Seconds later the car was fully on fire.
The rescue saved his life. It did not make him whole.
That sixteen year old went to the hospital with a broken spine and severe injuries to his arms, and he lost a leg.
He is alive. He is not fine. Both of those things are true and neither one cancels the other.
Mallon-Echols stayed at the scene into the early hours answering questions from police. Later he found out the boy had gone to his own high school in Houston. Both of them athletes. They had never met.
The boy's younger brother eventually found him on Instagram, and the family asked to meet him. His mother hugged him and cried and called him their guardian angel.
He does not think he is a hero. He thinks he did what needed doing. He described the hesitation this way.
Everyone thinks someone else is going to help. Someone else is going to call 911. Someone else is going to pull them out of the car.
Most of us know the hesitation he means.
Isaiah is in the middle of a long passage about a society that has gone wrong, where truth and justice have been pushed aside and the prophet describes what GOD sees when GOD looks at it.
And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him.
The movement belongs to GOD.
HE looks. HE finds no one to intervene. And the text says HE wondered at it, which is a strange word to use about GOD and is exactly the right one. Astonishment that no one stepped in.
And then HE does not wait any longer for somebody suitable to volunteer.
HIS own arm brought salvation.
The gospel reveals the fullest shape of that sentence. GOD did not leave salvation to a delegate or wait for somebody else to accomplish it. GOD looked at the whole situation and came down into it personally, with HIS own arm, in the flesh, into a family, into a country under occupation, and eventually onto a cross.
That is the whole shape of what GOD has done from the beginning. HE does not stand at the edge assuming that somebody better equipped will handle salvation. Where nobody else could accomplish it, HE acted HIMSELF.
Psalm 3 is identified as a psalm of David when he fled from his own son Absalom. It opens with many rising against him and saying there is no help for him in GOD.
But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.
The lifter up of mine head. The image is physical. A man whose head is down, and GOD is the one who puts a hand under his chin and raises it.
David does not claim the threat disappeared. The people saying there is no help for him have not become the final voice. What David claims is that GOD is between him and the threat, and that GOD is holding his head up while it goes on.
Somebody around you is in something right now.
You have probably already thought about it once this week and concluded that you are not the right person. Somebody closer to them will call. Somebody who knows what to say. Somebody with more time, or the right words, or an actual professional qualification.
That young man had a shirt.
He did not have training or equipment or a plan. He had a shirt off his own back and a stranger beside him. What they did could not undo the boy's injuries. It was enough to get him out of the car.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one waiting for somebody more qualified to go instead of you.
- 🙏 To the one who was pulled out and is still not whole.
- 🙏 To the one whose head has been down a long time.
- 🙏 To the one nobody stopped for.
Grace and Peace.