Thanks you two for showing me exactly why this relates. It connects directly to this: Can We Empirically Detect "Agency"?, and the conversation with @rcohlers. Read these two sections of the article, the two places were the divine seems most visible.
Divine Protection
Kaew, the Thai Navy SEAL member, was standing in the chilly flood of the cave on Tuesday night, swallowing his last bite of seafood-and-pineapple pizza, when he heard the yelled warning: More water was coming fast — get out now.
For three grueling days, he and his comrades had been hefting the 12 boys and their coach one by one through the series of slick and steep caverns to safety.
Just moments before the alarm, he had welcomed back the SEAL team that stayed with the boys for eight days on the rock where they had been trapped deep within Tham Luang’s flooded maze.
“The boys were safe, and my friends were safe,” said Kaew, who was not authorized to give his full name. “I thought, finally, the mission is a success.”
Then, when it was seemingly all over, a drainage pump to minimize flooding failed. What had been waist-high water surged to chest level in a vicious torrent where Kaew was standing, about a half-mile inside the cave’s mouth. Kaew, who had no scuba gear with him, scrambled to higher ground, barely escaping the final deluge.
It was a chaotic finale to the rescue. Many of the divers and residents of the nearby northern Thai town of Mae Sai saw the last-minute flood as a sign that divine protection had ceased only after all were safe.
For the entire mission, Kaew had wrapped a Buddha amulet hanging on his neck with waterproof tape. “The cave is sacred,” he said. “It was protected until the very end.”
So several people there perceived God’s providential governance over this situation. It is the timing that seems to signal meaning, not any notion of laws being broken. A question for @rcohlers, how could empiricism even in principle tell us if this was special divine action or not? What evidence could tell us if it was divine protection or not? And theologically speaking, why do these question of mechanism matter even the slightest?
And look at an equally valid interpretation, chance,
“The most important piece of the rescue was good luck,” said Maj. Gen. Chalongchai Chaiyakham, the deputy commander of the Third Army region, which helped the operation. “So many things could have gone wrong, but somehow we managed to get the boys out.”
And see these excerpts:
“I don’t know of any other rescue that put the rescuer and the rescuee in so much danger over a prolonged period of time, unless it is something along the lines of firefighters going into the World Trade Center knowing that the building is on fire and is going to collapse,” Major Hodges said.
The risks were underscored on July 6 when Saman Gunan, a retired Thai Navy SEAL, died in an underwater passageway. Three SEAL frogmen were hospitalized after their air tanks ran low. Swift currents pushed divers off-track for hours at a time, sometimes tearing off their face masks.
Four days after the boys were found, Mr. Saman, the retired Navy SEAL member who left his airport security job to volunteer, died as he was placing air tanks on an underwater supply route. His family declined an autopsy, but some Thai officials said that he ran out of air in his tanks. Others believe he succumbed to hypothermia.
“I’m very proud of him,” said Mr. Saman’s father, Wichai Gunan, a car mechanic. “He is a hero who did all he could to help the boys.”
Even just cutting and pasting these quotes here, is emotional for me. Here, a father (Wichai) proud of the nature of his son’s death (Saman). I am sure he loves his son, and grieves his absence too. Still, he finds something of deep and enduring pride here, and we all know he is right.
As the story was unfolding, I remember feeling real sadness in Saman’s death. It would be causally and logically valid to say that these kids and the coach “caused” his death by trespassing past the warning signs at the cave’s entrance. It is because of their mistake, an innocent man is dead. That is logically and causally valid, but it is not how any one seems to see this. Instead, we rightfully rejoice at the return of the lost children. Even the coach who led them into the cave is commended for carefully protecting them the best he could. No one is blamed, and we see a true story of cooperation and bravery and love.
It is easy to dismiss all that as a publicity ready gloss. However, there is something about us that wants to read the story that way. In some sense we know that Wichai has some right to be angry with the coach for his son Saman’s death. Perhaps he even is, and that is being hidden from us. However, we know that the Image of God in this moment is Wichai, reflecting to us all the heart of the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son. There is Grace from the father beyond what we might rightfully expect, even as we come to expect it as we know the Father is truly good.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
Even if the prayer meeting was Christian, it likely included Buddhists too, and it is in Buddhist cultural context. It seems this reading is just as those even in this culture seem to read it. There seems to be something deeply resonant between this story and the Gospel. And of note, this also was “caused” by the trespass of the children and the coach as they entered the cave. It was made more clear by the death of Saman, the peril of the rain, and also the failure of the pumps.