The Rescue Team That Brought a Body Bag

In January 2024, a search-and-rescue crew in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado set out to recover the body of 34-year-old hiker Daniel Ostrander. He had been missing for five days in subzero conditions. No one survives that. The team packed a body bag and a stretcher. They rehearsed the grim protocol for notifying his parents. One volunteer later admitted she had already started composing the words in her head.

When they reached the snow cave Daniel had dug beneath a fallen spruce, they found him sitting upright, coherent, wrapped in a space blanket he had packed on impulse. He looked at the stunned crew and said, "I've been waiting for you."

The rescuers froze. Two of them wept on the spot. They had come prepared for death and found life instead, and for a long, strange moment, not one of them knew what to do with that.

That is exactly what happened at the tomb. The women came at dawn carrying burial spices, rehearsing their grief, wondering who would move the stone. They had every reason to expect a corpse. Instead, they found an empty slab and a messenger who said, "He has risen. He is not here." And Mark tells us they fled, trembling and astonished, because sometimes the news that death has lost is so enormous that the first honest response is not a hymn — it is holy, breathless silence.