When the Whole World Watched Them Rise

On October 13, 2010, a billion people around the globe sat glued to their screens as a narrow rescue capsule named Phoenix emerged from a half-mile beneath the Atacama Desert in Chile. One by one, thirty-three miners — trapped for sixty-nine days in darkness — rose into the light. With each man who stepped out, the crowd at Camp Hope erupted. Strangers embraced. Chilean flags waved from Santiago to New York. In living rooms across six continents, people who had never met these miners wept and cheered as though welcoming home their own family.

Nobody had to be told to celebrate. The sheer marvel of the rescue demanded it. You cannot witness that kind of deliverance and stay quiet.

The psalmist understood this impulse at its deepest level. "Sing to the Lord a new song, for He has done marvelous things; His right hand and His holy arm have worked salvation." The rescue God accomplishes is not hidden in some back room — He has "made His salvation known" so that "all the ends of the earth have seen" it. And the only fitting response is what the psalm commands: shout, burst into jubilant song, make music.

If the rescue of thirty-three miners moved a watching world to spontaneous praise, how much more should the salvation of the Almighty — who reaches into the deepest darkness to bring His people into the light — move us to sing a new song every single day?