Through the Tunnel

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne spends nineteen years inside a prison he never deserved. But what we remember most is not the years of suffering — it is the night he finally escapes. Andy crawls through five hundred yards of raw sewage pipe, a passage so foul that most people would turn back after the first ten feet. When he emerges on the other side, he stumbles into a rain-swollen creek, tears off his prison shirt, and lifts his arms to the sky. The rain pours over him like a baptism. He is free.

Here is what strikes me every time I watch that scene: freedom was not clean. It was not handed to him on a silver platter. Andy had to crawl through the worst thing imaginable to reach the open air on the other side.

The Apostle Paul understood this. He wrote to the Galatians, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." But Paul also bore the scars — shipwrecks, beatings, chains, a thorn in the flesh that never left. Freedom in Christ does not mean the absence of struggle. It means that the struggle is no longer the final word.

Some of you are in the tunnel right now. The passage is dark, and it does not smell like victory. But the God who promised you freedom is waiting on the other side of it. Keep crawling. The rain is coming.