Five Hundred Yards to Freedom

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne spends nineteen years inside the walls of a brutal prison for a crime he didn't commit. But every night, while the other inmates sleep, Andy chips away at his cell wall with a rock hammer no bigger than his palm. He hides his work behind a poster. Nobody knows. Nobody sees. For nearly two decades, he scrapes through concrete and stone with no guarantee that freedom waits on the other side.

Then comes the night he finally breaks through. Andy crawls through five hundred yards of sewer pipe — filth and darkness pressing in from every side — and emerges into a thunderstorm. He stands in the rain, arms wide open, face lifted to the sky. Free.

That scene takes my breath away every time, because it looks so much like faith. Hebrews 11:1 tells us faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Andy couldn't see the other side of that wall. He couldn't know the pipe would lead to a creek and not a dead end. But he kept chipping. Night after night after night.

Faith isn't a feeling that washes over us in a worship service. Faith is picking up the hammer again on the ten-thousandth night when the wall looks exactly the same as it did on the first. The Almighty doesn't ask us to see the ending. He asks us to keep digging.