Crawling Through the Dark Toward Purpose

In The Shawshank Redemption, there is a scene that still takes my breath away. Andy Dufresne has spent nearly twenty years inside a prison he never deserved. Night after night, he has been crawling through a tunnel he carved with a rock hammer no bigger than his palm. And on the night he finally breaks through, he emerges into a sewage pipe — half a mile of filth and darkness — dragging himself forward on his elbows through the worst of it.

When he finally bursts out the other end, he stands in the rain, arms wide, face turned toward heaven. Free.

Here is what strikes me. Andy did not stumble into that moment. Every single night for two decades, he worked with quiet, deliberate purpose. He did not know exactly when the breakthrough would come. He only knew he was made for something beyond those walls.

The Apostle Paul understood that kind of holy stubbornness. He wrote, "I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:14). Paul had every reason to quit — shipwrecks, beatings, imprisonment. But he knew the Almighty had authored a purpose for his life that no prison could contain.

Some of you are in the tunnel right now. You cannot see the end. The work feels impossibly small, the progress invisible. But God did not place that calling inside you by accident. Keep crawling. The rain is coming.