Through the Sewers with a Stranger on His Back

In Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, there is a scene that has haunted readers for over a century. Jean Valjean, an aging ex-convict who has spent his life clawing toward redemption, hoists the unconscious body of young Marius onto his shoulders and descends into the sewers of Paris. The boy is dying. The streets above are a war zone. The only way out is through.

What follows is one of literature's great portraits of perseverance. Valjean wades through absolute darkness, through filth that rises to his chest, through tunnels where the air itself seems to resist him. At one point he sinks into a stretch of soft ground that nearly swallows them both. Every reasonable calculation says to stop, to save himself. He does not stop. He carries a man he barely knows through miles of underground darkness because he has decided that this life matters.

The Apostle Paul wrote, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper season we will reap a harvest if we do not give up" (Galatians 6:9). Most of us will never wade through a sewer. But all of us know what it is to carry a burden through darkness with no visible end. The call of the Almighty is not to see the exit before we start walking. It is simply to keep walking — trusting that He who began a good work in us will carry it to completion.