Hope in the Rain

In the final act of The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne crawls through five hundred yards of sewage pipe — half the length of five football fields — to emerge on the other side of the prison wall. What follows is one of cinema's most unforgettable images. Andy stands in a thunderstorm, arms outstretched, face lifted to the sky, letting the rain wash twenty years of imprisonment off his skin. The filth, the darkness, the suffocating tunnel — all of it behind him. Ahead, only freedom.

Earlier in the film, Andy tells his friend Red something the old convict can barely stomach: "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." Red calls hope dangerous. Inside those walls, hope seems like cruelty — a promise the world has no intention of keeping.

But Andy was right. Hope carried him through two decades of wrongful conviction, through beatings and isolation and soul-crushing routine. It kept his hands digging when reason said stop.

The apostle Paul knew that crawl. He wrote from a Roman prison, "We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame." The tunnel is real. The filth is real. But so is the rain on the other side.

Whatever pipe you are crawling through this morning, keep moving. The storm of grace is waiting.