Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: A Song for the Texas Rescuers, by Bob Greene:
There are some 1,400 miles between the flooded Texas Hill Country and Washington’s National Mall. Over the holiday weekend the exhausted rescue crews in Texas, desperately searching for people they might save in the furious waters, couldn’t have known about the woman in the capital who was performing a song in tribute to men and women very much like them.
Her name was Lauren Daigle. Her performance was scheduled months in advance; the timing, at this terrible moment, was unplanned. As all those children in Texas remained unaccounted for, she sang:
I hear you whisper underneath your breath
I hear your SOS, your SOS
In Texas the searchers understood, as first responders understand every day in every corner of this country, that they were all that the children and their families had to depend on. So many futures rested on whether the searchers could get there on time, or whether it was already too late.
If they succeeded, a child might begin fourth grade in the fall. If they succeeded, an empty chair at a family’s dinner table might soon not be empty at all.
The searchers could have had no idea that at that moment, the singer on the National Mall was well into her song, which was called “Rescue”:
“I will send out an army to find you
In the middle of the darkest night . . .”
At times like these, the utter foolishness of the things we allow to divide us are swept aside. To the children who may or may not still have been alive, who may or may not still have been lost and waiting in the dark, and to their families waiting at home, nothing about the searchers mattered except their fortitude, and their guts, and the love in their hearts to keep going.
You are not hidden
There's never been a moment
You were forgotten
You are not hopeless
Though you have been broken
Your innocence stolen
I hear you whisper underneath your breath
I hear your SOS, your SOS
I will send out an army
To find you in the middle of the darkest night
It's true, I will rescue you
There is no distance
That cannot be covered
Over and over
You're not defenseless
I'll be your shelter
I'll be your armor
I hear you whisper underneath your breath
I hear your SOS, your SOS
I will send out an army
To find You in the middle of the darkest night
It's true, I will rescue you
And I will never stop marching
To reach you in the middle of the hardest fight
It's true, I will rescue you
I hear the whisper underneath your breath
I hear you whisper you have nothing left
I will send out an army
To find you in the middle of the darkest night
It's true, I will rescue you
And I will never stop marching
To reach you in the middle of the hardest fight
It's true, I will rescue you
Oh, I will rescue you
