Trying to Get Out
"I think I'm going to have to hand this off." - Rachel Maddow.
"If I keep silent, the stones will cry out." - after Luke 19:40. [*]
July 2025. The Guadalupe River near Hunt, Texas, surged nearly twenty-nine feet in less than an hour, overtaking roads, cabins, and the ordinary summer sounds of Camp Mystic. At least ninety lives were lost—campers and counselors, girls as young as eight and nine.
Some counselors, realizing how fast the water was coming, wrote names on each child’s arm so that if they were separated, or worse, their identities wouldn’t be lost.
Across the ocean, Ukraine endured its largest drone-and-missile barrage since the war began. Over 550 weapons struck cities and villages—Kyiv, Kharkiv, Huliaipole—some lasting through the night. Apartment buildings crumbled, basements filled with families once again sheltering in fear, and homes already rebuilt were reduced to rubble. Grief continues in loops, not lines.
I keep thinking of something else—but not unrelated: June 19, 2018, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, usually precise and composed, tried to read an AP bulletin about migrant babies being sent to “tender-age” shelters. She barely got the first sentence out before stopping cold. “I think I’m going to have to hand this off,” she said, blinking rapidly, trying not to cry. Later, she apologized online, saying she’d failed to deliver the news calmly. But the moment stuck. It was not a performance. It was a crack in the routine, a glimpse of someone overwhelmed not by opinion but by fact.
Poet Charles Bukowski, known for his gritty vulgarity, once wrote about a “bluebird” he keeps hidden in his chest—soft, breakable, and alive. He locks it away during the day, letting it out only at night. “Otherwise my poetry wouldn’t sell,” he explains. "It's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?“ he asks—not accusing, but inviting the reader to admit they, too, carry something tender behind whatever they use to pass as strong.
Scripture says that “hope that is seen is not hope.” (Romans 8:24) Real hope doesn’t come with confirmation. It begins without guarantee—in the dark, in the flood, in the shelter, in the war zone. It survives not because the odds are good but because someone, somewhere, still bothers to act as if the odds aren’t final.
Consider this. As the Guadalupe rose past the cypress trees, Camp Mystic’s director, Dick Eastland, ran cabin to cabin, lifting girls onto roofs, shoving them into the arms of waiting counselors. He saved dozens. Then he disappeared into the current. His last act was a decision not to leave while a child still needed him.
Or this. After a missile strike in Kyiv earlier this year, surgeons at a children’s hospital moved their patients and equipment into an unfinished wing and resumed operations. When the power failed, they taped flashlights to their foreheads and kept going, finishing heart surgeries in the dark—stitching by memory and instinct, because a child’s heartbeat wouldn’t wait for morning.
And one more. In an El Paso courtroom, during the sentencing of the man who killed twenty-three people in a Walmart parking lot in 2019, Yolanda Tinajero—whose brother was among the dead—approached the shooter and asked to hug him. The judge allowed it. She didn’t offer a speech. She wrapped her arms around the man who had taken everything from her family, not to forget, but to keep hate from finishing what bullets began.
These acts don’t erase the horror. They don’t answer Job—ancient sufferer, relentless questioner—or cancel the flood. They don’t promise that goodness wins. But they do prove that goodness hasn’t left the building.
Job is never given a satisfying answer. His friends talk too much. God answers with a storm (38:1). The monsters remain. But the story isn’t about the monsters in the end. It’s about the baffling fact that goodness keeps showing up—uninvited, unpaid, and not always noticed—long after destruction thinks it has the final word.
I honor the counselors who picked up a Sharpie when nothing else could be done. I honor the surgeons who kept going, flashlight-strapped and bone-tired, because the child still needed a chance. I honor Maddow, not for breaking down, but for failing to fake it. The crack was the point.
These moments don’t offer closure. They don’t solve the riddle of suffering. But they insist—quietly, stubbornly—that something better than despair is still possible.
Trying to get out—without crying—was never the goal. Just getting out with your humanity intact might be. The blue bird is here to stay. Maddow and the poet are in tears.
Notes and reading
[*] "If I keep silent, the stones will cry out." - after Luke 19:40. Though originally a rebuke to those who would silence praise, this line expresses something universal: when human voices are stilled by overwhelming grief, injustice, or awe, the truth will inevitably find another medium of expression. If we don’t speak, something else—a news anchor’s crack, a Sharpie on a child’s arm, a flashlight on a surgeon’s brow—will.
How to Help the Texas Flood Victims - Claire Moses, The New York Times (July 7, 2025).
Charles Bukowski - Bukowski captured the raw underside of American life with brutal honesty and deadpan wit, writing in a voice that was unmistakably his own.
The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? - David Bentley Hart (2011). “It is the mystery of the good, not the problem of evil, that should first engage our thoughts.” This slim yet powerful book explores the presence of inexplicable goodness in a world filled with suffering and evil. Hart confronts theodicy not with easy answers but with philosophical and theological depth, arguing that acts of gratuitous goodness point to something beyond natural explanation.
Consider the parallels and distinctions with Simone Weil’s concept of “Affliction” in Gravity and Grace (1947–48). Weil’s paradox suggests that suffering is not accidental; rather, it strips away illusion and reveals a hidden, redeeming grace. By contrast, Hart sees the appearance of gratuitous goodness as pointing to the world’s true destiny—not as something arising from the necessity of affliction. He would be careful to clarify his position, distancing himself from any theodicy that seeks to justify or require suffering.
Your post is bread to eat as we process everything else. Thank you for writing it.
"The monsters remain. But the story isn’t about the monsters in the end." Yes.
I wasn't aware of that quote from David Bentley Hart. It's very engaging with one's spirit.
One of your best, Bill. Thank you!!!