In October of 2018, a famous boys’ soccer team from Thailand was invited to play at the Youth Olympic Games in Argentina.i Just before the team took the pitch, the coach called them over for a huddle. Since they were famous, the coach knew they would receive a big welcome from the crowd in the grandstands. So, he asked the boys how they thought they should respond. “Should we wave or should we wai?”
Wai, spelled W-A-I, is how to say “hello” in Thailand. To wai, you put your palms together over your heart and slightly bow your head, in a prayer-like posture. It’s a gesture of humility, gratitude, and respect toward the person you’re greeting. And so, just before entering the stadium, the coach asked his team, “Should we wave or wai? Or, wai first, then wave?”
The boys were all of one mind. Waving was what heroes do. They were not heroes. They were those who’d been saved by the heroes. And they wanted to show their thanks and respect. They all agreed: there would be no waving that day.ii
Three months earlier, during the event that made them famous, the boys on the soccer team were in a very different setting, but still all of one mind. They would trust the doctor. The doctor had told the boys what would happen in clear and simple terms: one at a time, you’ll come down to the waterside and sit with me. You’ll get a shot in one leg. And a second shot in the other. Fall asleep. And wake up in bed. That was the way out. It was the only way. And it was all the boys needed to know, for now. From the boys’ perspective, having gotten themselves trapped inside this cave for the last ten days;—ten days without food, ten days without knowing whether they’d be found;—they knew enough to know that the situation was serious, and that the doctor could be trusted.
But they didn’t need to know all the details. They didn’t need to know that after the good doctor put them under anesthesia, a team of weekend cave divers, Thai Navy SEALs, foreign military special forces, plus hundreds of other volunteers would slowly and carefully carry each of their motionless, zip-tied bodies through a two-mile labyrinth of jagged limestone tunnels, ten-soccer-field-lengths of which were submerged in an underground river of cold, dark, muddy water. They didn’t need to know the hundreds of ways the rescue could go wrong, that asleep, under anesthesia, their airway could collapse, or their mask could get dislodged, or the anesthesia might wear off half-way through, and they’d wake up underwater in a cave under a mountain and panic, and fight with their diver, dislodge his mask, cause him to get stuck or lost, and drown the both of them. Even if they wanted to know it all, they couldn’t handle it.
I don’t suppose any mere mortal could truly handle what was happening there;—the tenuously organized chaos in and outside the cave: 10,000 people;—military and police, engineers and farmers, geologists, cooks, and medics, cave divers, and taxi drivers from a couple dozen countries;—countless tasks to divert millions of gallons of water, transport supplies, cook meals, offer prayers, in a frenzied race against monsoon rains on a mountain in northern Thailand, all working to save these boys.
Even today, seven years later, after at least eight books and nine movie documentaries have tried to tell the story from different perspectives, I don’t think anybody could handle all the ins and outs of this rescue.iii But here’s the thing: the boys didn’t need to. All they needed to know was, the doctor will sit with you by the water. You’ll get a couple of shots. Fall asleep. And wake up soon enough.iv
That was the promise, anyway.
Do you remember hearing about this on the news, this rescue from the summer of 2018? When I read about it in Christina Soontornvat’s book, titled, All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team, I already knew the ending. And my heart was racing all the way to the end. I didn’t realize that finding the boys trapped in the cave, making the way in to them, was the easy part.
The way out for the boys was going to require a series of seven separate cave dives through water as murky as day-old coffee. They figured it would take three hours for each individual rescue, so, the boys, none of whom knew how to swim, had to be anesthetized, because even experienced cave divers were liable to panic under such circumstances. One Thai Navy SEAL diver had already died trying to make the way out for them. So, the boys had to be put under, even though no doctor in the world had ever tried putting an anesthetized person under water before. And because each rescue would take three hours, the boys would need multiple doses, because one dose only lasted 45 minutes. And the shots would have to be given in the cave, administered by non-medical personnel who’d been trained only the day before by giving shots into a plastic water bottle. The risks were incalculably high, and they needed to do it not just once, but 13 times. And looking back, after all 13 were finally saved, the man who knew the cave the best said simply, “It should not have worked.”v Even the doctor who made that promise to the boys had been steeling himself for the worst. Privately, he feared that all the boys would die in the rescue.vi
But that burden was on him, him and his team of 10,000. They would bear it. The boys’ part wasn’t so heroic. All they did was crawl down to the water, one by one, and trust the doctor to take care of them. It wasn’t blind faith, though. The rescue team had made a way in, after all, a task that had also seemed impossible until it was accomplished. The boys had been lost for ten days, remember? Outside the cave, the rescuers thought they were dead. Inside the cave, the boys were in the dark, huddled together on a damp patch of high ground, starving, barely surviving on water dripping from the walls, with no sign that help was coming.
And then, on day ten, a single rescue diver, with a light on his helmet, emerges from the water, followed by his partner moments later, and everything changed. One of the boys, then-14-year-old Adul, reflected on this later. He said that seeing “a single person, a living person,” rise up out of the water to meet them changed everything. “All the hope we had, you know, it just became real.”vii So, it wasn’t blind faith. If the rescue team had made a way in to them, they figured they could make a way out.
In other news this last week, Roman Catholic Christians, and even some Protestant Christians celebrated “All Saints Day.” Saints are sometimes called “heroes of the faith.” Historically, Catholics and Protestants have disagreed about the role of the saints.viii It’s not by accident that the date for the Protestant Reformation is the day before All Saints Day, October 31, 508 years ago, when a monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses. Luther and the other early reformers agreed with their Roman Catholic opponents that Christians who have gone before us could be something like heroes, in that they help inspire us, but they argued that nothing in the Bible calls us to pray to a deceased Christian, nor do we have any assurance that they can hear us if we do pray to them. So, that was part of the debate.
But there was and is a bigger issue at stake. Because there will come a moment in your life, no matter how good you feel now, no matter who you are or what you are, Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, non-denom, or none of the above;—there will come a moment when you realize you are trapped in something like a cave, and you can’t get yourself out.
This moment of crisis may come to you by way of guilt or regret, failure, shame, loneliness, emptiness, or just awareness of the fact that you’re going to die one day. Whatever it is, when you crawl down to the water, and surrender your rights and stop trying to save yourself, who is sitting there with you? In that moment, where do you look? To whom do you call? In whom do you trust? The Bible says, “There is one Mediator between God and humankind, (one rescuer) the Man, Jesus Christ” (1 Timothy 2:15). Jesus says, “I am the Way” (John 14:6). No deceased saints, no good works, no lucky charms, not even Mary the mother of God herself can help you there. Jesus is your only way out.
Have you ever heard anyone say, “God won’t give you more than you can handle”? The saying is loosely based on a Bible verse, which says: “No temptation (or test) has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation (or test) He will also provide the way out, that you may be able to endure it.” That’s from 1 Corinthians 10:13. Some people take this to mean, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” It’s not necessarily a wrong way to take the verse. For you, who trust in Jesus, it only becomes wrong when you put yourself, or any other mere human, in the wrong part of the story. It becomes wrong when you imagine yourself as the hero, rather than pressing your palms together and bowing to Jesus.
Who is the hero of this story? That’s the bigger question behind that Bible passage from 1 Corinthians. The writer of the letter, the letter to the church in Corinth, the writer was a man named Paul. In the letter, Paul is addressing Christians who forgot their place in the story. They started to think that they were the heroes. Paul says they had gotten “puffed up” (1 Corinthians 4:6, 8:1) on their own importance, full of themselves, worshiping their local heroes (1 Corinthians 1:12), waving for the crowd. They’d forgotten where we are in the story. So, Paul reminds them. He wants them to see themselves as living out the ongoing plotline of the Bible, especially patterned on the Old Testament book of Numbers. Now, if you don’t know the book of Numbers, I encourage you to visit our archives. Listen to the last eight episodes of this program, starting back in September, which have been about the book of Numbers, the account of God’s people in the wilderness.
Here’s a quick synopsis: God’s people were in the middle of a rescue. The first stage has happened: God made a way in to us. Jesus found us in the wilderness. He died on the cross and rose up from the dead to meet us, the light shining in the darkness, who made all our hopes real. And now, the second stage of the rescue is in progress: God is making the way out;—out of the wilderness, out of the cave, into a new life, eternal life with God. And in the interim, we’re called to wait on God, to participate, and to trust. But it’s not blind faith. It’s faith based on God’s faithful record. God already made a way in. God already reconciled us to Himself through the death of His Son (2 Corinthians 5:18-21). Jesus is already risen, is with us, and calls us to the water to be baptized. So, we can rely on Him to do the rest. We can hand ourselves over to Him. We can trust Him. But we cannot, we must not forget where we are in the story. Because we’re still in-between. And the threats and the risks are more than we can handle.
Listen to how Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 10. He said, “I don’t want you to be unaware, brothers [and sisters], that our forefathers, our spiritual ancestors, they were all under the cloud [under God’s protection and guidance], they all passed through the sea [rescued by God’s deliverance], they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea and all ate the same spiritual/supernatural food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from the spiritual Rock that followed them. And that Rock was Christ.
But with most of them, God was not pleased, for [their bodies] were scattered through the wilderness. Now, these things happened as formative patterns for us, to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not commit idolatry, do not worship false gods as some of them did, as it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to indulge in pagan revelry. And we should not practice sexual immorality as some of them did, and 23,000 fell [dead] in a single day. And we should not put Christ to the test, as some of them tested [Him], and were being killed by snakes. And do not grumble, as some of them grumbled, and were destroyed by the Destroyer.
These things kept happening to them as formative patterns, and they were written down for our instruction, for us on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore, let anyone who thinks he stands, watch out, so that he doesn’t fall. No temptation, no test has overtaken you that is not common to humankind. And God is faithful, God is trustworthy. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear, but alongside the temptation, alongside the test, God will make the way out, so that you can endure it.
Sometimes, when I hear that last verse taken out of context, I imagine myself as the hero of the story, that it’s up to me to make a way out, that I have to apply some biblical principle or formula to handle it. And God won’t give me more than I can handle, right? There is some truth to this. God does call all Christians, all the saints everywhere not to be heroes, but to participate in this second stage of the rescue, to serve others in love, to speak often of our hope, to be a part of His team of ten-thousand-thousands. And God calls each of us not to cave under trial and temptation. I like how Martin Luther put it, “You cannot prevent the birds from flying over your head, but you can certainly keep them from building a nest in your hair.”ix
Some days, the most heroic thing you can do is just keeping the nests out of your hair, to surrender your efforts to save yourself or satisfy yourself, whether it’s with sex or politics, money or family, the latest fad, or a weekend hobby. But all together, the threats are incalculably high. God’s rescue operation is unimaginably complex. And it’s more than you can handle. Only Jesus could make a way in for you. Only Jesus, only Jesus can make the way out.
So, if Jesus doesn’t ask us to make the way in, or the way out, or to comprehend how He can promise to be the Way for everyone, what does He ask of us? He asks, and commands, that we become people on the way, like those 13 young men from the Thai soccer team. During that second stage of the rescue, they participated as they were able. They were fed, encouraged, and accompanied by the rescue team. They lived as people on the way. They made plans for what they would do after the rescue. They huddled together to stay warm. They cleaned up their area and kept the cave tidy. And when someone got sad, the others cheered him up. They played checkers and chess, using rocks and a playing board drawn in the sand. They hand-wrote encouraging notes that were carried to their families. They hugged the rescue divers and spoke often of their hope.x
They weren’t heroes, but they participated in the rescue as best they could until it was time to fall asleep under the promise: “You’ll wake up soon enough and everything will be okay.”
All the boys in the cave were Buddhist except for one Christian, the 14-year-old boy I mentioned earlier named Adul. Adul was a refugee from a neighboring country, taken in and raised by a local Thai Christian family and church. Adul had another practice in the cave that kept him on the way. He said that he must have sung “How Great Is Our God” and prayed The Lord’s Prayer thousands of times. “I couldn’t see much in the cave,” he said, “and I realized that’s quite similar to how I can’t see God in real life. But I have to trust He’s going to show His power and goodness at the end.”
Because of the massive media attention, all the boys, Adul included, became overnight famous. This opened doors of opportunity for many of them, such as that chance to compete in the Youth Olympics in Argentina. Later, Adul was invited to the United States to study for high school and college. Last I read, he’s starting his junior year at college. And it sounds like he’s kept his humble posture. “Sometimes I forget that I really didn’t do anything to deserve this,” he says, still waving off praise with a prayerful bow, “All I did was get stuck in a cave. But then I remember that this is God blessing me and I am just so grateful.”xi In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
i Bianca Britton, “Boys rescued from Thai cave play friendly at World Cup stadium,” CNN, Oct 8, 2018. Accessed on Sept 17, 2025 at cnn.com/2018/10/08/football/thai-cave-soccer-team-buenos-aires-stadium-spt-intl
ii Christina Soontornvat, All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team (Candlewick, 2020), 224.
iii There may be more, but the Wikipedia page lists 8 books and 9 film productions: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue
iv Soontornvat, All Thirteen, 184.
v Soontornvat, All Thirteen, 223.
vi Mark Irwin, “The Thailand Cave Rescue: General Anesthesia in Unique Circumstances Presents Ethical Challenges for the Rescue Team,” J Bioeth Inq. (June 19, 2022), 265-271. Accessed on Sept 16, 2025 at pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9233648/
vii Becca Clark, “Adul Samon … survivor of the 2018 Thai cave disaster, shares experience …” The Middlebury Campus, November 9, 2023. Accessed on Sept 16, 2025 at middleburycampus.com/article/2023/11/adul-samon-27-survivor-of-the-2018-thai-cave-disaster-shares-experience-receives-media-attention
viii See the historic debate between Lutherans and Roman Catholics in The Augsburg Confession, Article XXI, “Worship of the Saints,” and The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article XXI: thebookofconcord.org/augsburg-confession/
ix Martin Luther, “An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer for Simple Laymen,” quoted in The Book of Concord, eds. Kolb and Wengert (St Louis: Concordia, 2006), 454n187.
x Soontornvat, All Thirteen, 133-152).
xi Silas Low, “‘Waiting to be rescued, I sang How Great is Our God thousands of times’: Thai cave survivor Adul Sam-on,” Salt&Light, March 26, 2021. Accessed on Sept 16, 2025 at saltandlight.sg/faith/waiting-to-be-rescued-i-sang-how-great-is-our-god-thousands-of-times-thai-cave-survivor-adul-sam-on/
Reflections for November 2, 2025
Title: Identity in the Wildnerness
Mark Eischer: Now back to our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. Today I am visiting with Professor Shelly Schwalm. She teaches courses about Christian life and ministry at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Welcome back to the program, Shelly.
Shelly Schwalm: Thanks for having me.
Mike Zeigler: So, last time we talked, you described the wilderness as an “in-between time.” These transitional periods-they’re stressful, they’re uncomfortable, but how do they contribute to our sense of who we are, our sense of identity?
Shelly Schwalm: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think about the people of Israel coming out of slavery. There are massive pieces of their identity that are being changed, going from being enslaved …
Mike Zeigler: Yeah, they’ve been enslaved for 430-some years.
Shelly Schwalm: … to no longer. Most of us are not going to have a change that’s quite that extreme. Like, I work with college students, [and] frequently we’ll have college students come to college, and they’re out of their home and their family system for the first time. It just raises lots of new questions about who am I and when those big changes happen. It can really make us question, who am I? What’s still true about me? What I thought I knew, is that still true?
Mike Zeigler: Well, so much of how our identity is formed is based on what people say about us.
Shelly Schwalm: Sure.
Mike Zeigler: And the children of Israel, they were simply-I think Pharaoh just calls them peasants and slaves and lazy. He speaks these things over them. And even though that was no longer true about them, they had a hard time shaking that whole identity. So, how do we see God reshaping their identity once they make it into the wilderness?
Shelly Schwalm: I think it’s one of the more exciting parts of the story to me. God creating this space in the in-between, after they leave slavery in Egypt and before they get to the Promised Land, this intentionality of God saying, “Okay, let’s talk about who you are,” let’s re-humanize, really, where they’ve been dehumanized, being enslaved for so long. First of all, He says, “I am your God who’s brought you out of Egypt,” defining them and their identity, their value by who He is and what He’s done for them.
Mike Zeigler: We talked about how God is restructuring His people’s identity. What does the Bible say about how God chooses to identify Himself?
Shelly Schwalm: Something that’s kind of captured me the last few years-the way that God describes, gives language to who He is by “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” And we see this kind of repetition throughout the Old Testament, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” this legacy and promise that He gives to Abraham and his descendants. God chooses to identify Himself by His people. And especially with Jacob-Jacob gets a name change to Israel. Jacob has-I mean, they all have their own issues, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, but …
Mike Zeigler: Jacob especially.
Shelly Schwalm: … Jacob especially, right. Kind of a slippery, slimy guy in those days. And so, the fact that God uses the name Jacob instead of Israel, I think is just really profound. Still, even when we are, the things we’re less excited or true about us that we’ve done or left undone, our less admirable characteristics, God’s saying, “No, I still chose you, even then.” Romans says while we were [yet] enemies with God is when Christ comes to us and befriends us through His death and resurrection.
Mike Zeigler: He’s the God who sticks with us. He sticks with His people.
Shelly Schwalm: That’s right.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you so much for joining us.
Shelly Schwalm: Thanks for having me.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Behold a Host, Arrayed in White” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.