Like many of you and with the whole world, Becky and are fixed to the unfolding story of the attempts to rescue the twelve soccer players and their coach trapped in a cave beneath a mountain in Thailand. We check our newsfeeds before going to bed and when we wake up, eager for the latest word, eager for the story of an amazing rescue.
“Brilliant!” said the diver from the UK who with his friend was first to find all thirteen alive after nine days lost. Video captures the moment; who would not be touched by it?
The rescuers in Thailand are racing against time, but for the watching world, time passes at an agonizingly slow pace. The news outlets fill their feed with background stories. Experts from around the world weigh in with their analyses of the situation sight unseen.
Midweek, one news source ran this headline over and over throughout a long newscycle: Ex-Navy Seal predicts fatalities if Thai kids dive. The ex-Seal was in Fort Collins, Colorado, and had only unhappy things to say. He may turn out to have been correct. Who knows what the news from Thailand may be by the time you read this.
The odds are not in favor of the soccer boys and their coach.
Logic suggests bad news and, calculating the odds, tells us to prepare for the worst. Logic wonders if we should give up and play the odds elsewhere. Logic assigns blame for the bad odds.
The money used for the cave rescue attempt in Thailand could be used to guarantee without doubt the survival of a thousand kids in sub-Saharan Africa. The coach and his boys entered the cave ignoring the signs warning them away. As of Friday morning, one life has already been lost in this against the odds foolish adventure.
We dare not abandon logic, but there is something human, something good, about working and hoping against the odds. The fundamental worth of the boys on the soccer team and their young coach is not measured by logic or odds. They are human. They are sons and brothers. Against the odds, eschewing cost analysis, all the world hopes for their rescue.
Attempts to explain such human goodness only makes the evolutionary biologists seem foolish.
We don’t know what will become of the twelve boys and their coach trapped a half mile below a mountain with the waters rising. The odds are not in their favor. But against all odds, we hope for their rescue. To play the odds would make us less than human.
Hope for good, hope for rescue, makes us human.
Yes, Christian hope, the hope against hope of which Paul writes in Romans 4:18 (in hope Abraham believed against hope, that should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.”) is a deeper sort of hope; it is a hope that makes us fully human.
The odds were not in favor of Sarah and Abraham. They were zero to one. Abraham’s and Sarah’s hope was secured not by good odds, but by God’s promise.
But today we join a waiting world in hoping for good, for the rescue of the boys and their coach. CNN’s expert may be correct in his prediction. Sometimes, however, its best not to play the odds. After all, they are rarely in our favor.
See you Sunday