Waiting for Dawn at the Mine Shaft

In August 2010, thirty-three Chilean miners sat trapped 2,300 feet below the Atacama Desert after a catastrophic cave-in sealed the San Jose mine. For seventeen days, the world didn't even know if they were alive. They had almost nothing — a few cans of tuna, some milk, two days' worth of cookies rationed across weeks. They scratched messages on scraps of paper and waited in the suffocating dark.

Then a drill bit broke through. Attached to it, the miners sent back a scrawled note: "Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33." We are fine in the shelter, all 33 of us.

But "fine" was generous. They were starving, frightened, and utterly dependent on rescuers they could not see. All they could do was wait — and trust that the voices coming through a four-inch borehole meant that deliverance was actually coming.

The psalmist knows that darkness. "Out of the depths I cry to You, O Lord." Psalm 130 is not written from a place of mild inconvenience. It is written from the mine shaft — from the place where guilt, grief, or despair has buried you alive and the air is running thin.

Yet the psalmist waits. "More than watchmen wait for the morning." Not passively, but expectantly — the way those miners listened for the grinding of the rescue drill, knowing that every hour brought the Phoenix capsule closer.

With the Lord, the psalmist declares, there is unfailing love and full redemption. The drill bit always breaks through.