Into the Deep

On January 23, 1960, oceanographer Jacques Piccard and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh climbed into the bathyscaphe Trieste and began their descent into the Mariana Trench — the deepest place on Earth. No human being had ever gone where they were going. Nearly seven miles down, the pressure outside their tiny steel sphere exceeded sixteen thousand pounds per square inch.

Then, at thirty thousand feet, they heard it — a loud crack. One of the outer window panes had fractured under the crushing weight of the ocean above them. Every instinct must have screamed to abort. The two men consulted each other briefly, checked their instruments, and made their decision.

They kept descending.

Twenty minutes later, the Trieste touched the floor of the Challenger Deep. And there, in a place of total darkness and impossible pressure, Piccard looked through the viewport and saw a flatfish gliding calmly across the sediment. Life, thriving in the very place that should have destroyed it.

Courage is not the absence of the crack. Courage is hearing it and continuing the descent because you trust something greater than your fear. The psalmist wrote, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me."

God never promised the window wouldn't crack. He promised He would be with us at the bottom.