Pulled Up into the Light

On October 13, 2010, Florencio Avalos stepped into a narrow steel capsule called the Phoenix, 2,300 feet below the Atacama Desert. For sixty-nine days, he and thirty-two other Chilean miners had been trapped in darkness after a catastrophic cave-in sealed every exit. Above them, rescue teams drilled through solid rock — not gently, but violently, grinding through 2,000 feet of stone that stood between the buried and the living.

When the drill finally broke through, cheers erupted across two continents. One by one, the miners were pulled up through that torn-open shaft into the night air. As Florencio emerged, his young son Bayron ran to him. Cameras captured the boy burying his face in his father's chest.

Mark tells us that when Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were "torn open." The Greek word is the same used for ripping cloth — something forceful and irreversible. God didn't politely part the sky. He broke through. And what came through that opening was the Spirit and a Father's voice: "You are My beloved Son; with You I am well pleased."

The distance between heaven and earth, like the rock above those miners, can feel impossibly thick. But the Almighty is a God who tears through. And when He does, what waits on the other side is not judgment — but a Father running to embrace His child.