Through the Rain

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne has spent nearly twenty years inside the gray walls of Shawshank State Penitentiary for a crime he did not commit. Night after night, he chisels through concrete with a tiny rock hammer, hiding his work behind a poster on the wall. No one knows. No one suspects. And then one stormy evening, Andy crawls through five hundred yards of sewage pipe — the filth and stench almost unbearable — and emerges on the other side into the pouring rain. He lifts his arms to the sky, and the rain washes him clean. He is free.

His friend Red, still behind bars, later finds a letter Andy left for him beneath a volcanic rock in a hayfield. The words are simple and stunning: "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

The world will try to convince you that hope is naive. Suffering has a way of whispering that nothing will ever change, that the walls around you are permanent. But the God who parted the Red Sea and rolled back the stone from an empty tomb is not finished with your story. The Almighty specializes in passages through impossible places.

Sometimes hope means crawling through the dark for a long time before you feel the rain on your face. But the rain does come. Hold on. The God of all hope is working on the other side of that wall.