The Concrete That Holds When the River Rises

In 1993, the Great Flood swallowed towns along the Mississippi. In Quincy, Illinois, sandbag walls crumbled one after another. But the Bayview Bridge stood. Engineers later explained that its pilings had been driven sixty feet into bedrock — far deeper than anyone could see from the surface. The water raged for weeks. The bridge held.

Margaret Chisholm was a nurse in Quincy that summer. She worked fourteen-hour shifts at Blessing Hospital while her own basement filled with river water. Years later, she told her pastor something remarkable: "I never once doubted we'd make it through. Not because I'm brave — I'm not. But something underneath me was solid. I could feel it in my prayers. God had already given me a hope that went deeper than that flood."

What Margaret described is exactly what Paul prays for the Thessalonian believers. They faced not rising water but rising persecution, confusion about Christ's return, and the exhaustion of holding firm when the world pressed in from every side. So Paul calls upon the Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father — the One who loved them first, who planted eternal comfort and good hope deep into their souls through sheer grace — to encourage their hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

That word "establish" carries the weight of those sixty-foot pilings. God does not hand us a shallow optimism. He drives His comfort down to bedrock, anchoring us in grace so that when the flood comes, we do not merely survive. We stand, and we serve.