Through the Storm Drain and Into the Rain

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne spends nineteen years inside the walls of a prison for a crime he did not commit. But every night, behind a poster on his cell wall, he chips away at concrete with a tiny rock hammer. Nobody knows. Nobody sees. Then one thundering night, Andy crawls through five hundred yards of sewage pipe — half a mile of darkness and filth — and emerges on the other side into a rain-soaked creek bed. He staggers to his feet, tears his prison shirt open, lifts his arms to the sky, and lets the rain wash over him. He is free.

That image has stayed with millions of viewers because it touches something we all recognize. Freedom never comes cheap. It costs something to crawl through the dark. It costs something to keep going when the passage is foul and the end is nowhere in sight.

The Apostle Paul understood this. He wrote to the Galatians, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." But the freedom Christ offers is different from Andy's in one breathtaking way — we did not dig the tunnel. Jesus crawled through the darkness for us. He bore the filth of sin we could not bear ourselves, so that we could stand in the open air of grace with arms lifted high.

Whatever prison still holds your heart today, the tunnel has already been dug. The way out is finished. All that remains is to walk through it.