The Day the Cable Snapped - And No One Fell
We trust systems we don’t understand every day. But when it comes to God, we suddenly need proof.
There was a time when people refused to step into elevators, and not because they were foolish, but because they understood something we’ve forgotten: if the cable snaps, you fall. Early lifts did fail. Cables broke. People died. Fear wasn’t irrational, it was earned. So when Elisha Otis stood before a crowd in 1854 and cut the only rope holding a platform above the ground, he wasn’t performing a trick, he was confronting fear. The platform dropped, then stopped, locked in place by a hidden mechanism no one could see. The crowd didn’t cheer because they understood it, they cheered because it held.
Now here we are. We step into elevators without thinking, scroll our phones while rising 20 floors, no hesitation, no questions, just quiet trust in something we have never inspected. But let life shake us once and suddenly we demand answers from God. Why this, why now, where are You. We will trust steel cables more easily than we trust a faithful God.
Life has a way of feeling like that moment, the cable cut, the drop beginning, the stomach turning as everything gives way. The diagnosis, the silence, the door that didn’t open, the person who didn’t stay. That drop is real. But history leaves us with something we try to ignore: there are systems in place you cannot see, mechanisms you did not build, hands that do not panic when you do. And sometimes the fall you feared never finishes.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1
Not imagined, not wished, evidence. Not of what you see, but of what is already holding. And if we’re honest, we still press the elevator button twice, just in case it comes faster. Maybe faith isn’t about never feeling the drop, maybe it’s about knowing that even there, you are still being held.