“Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? Lo, I see four men loose walking in the midst of the fire…and the form of the fourth is like a Son of God.”
— Book of Daniel
The reports come from many sources. Imperiled mountain climbers. Marooned polar explorers. Lost mariners at sea. Beleaguered prisoners of war. Solo aviators. Endangered astronauts. Cave divers deep under the ocean. Disaster victims fighting to survive. And then there’s Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the Bible. All facing nearly insurmountable odds. All at the very limits of their human capacity.
While apart from one another, their tales might seem outlandish, yet John Geiger in his 2009 book entitled The Third Man Factor, collects so many miraculous survival stories in one place that it forces the reader to wrestle with this big question: Why is it that so many adventurers and others who find themselves at the borderline between life and death earnestly tell strikingly similar stories of having experienced the presence of a mysterious companion who plays a pivotal role in their survival? Geiger’s book offers story after story of a presence—more felt than seen—who offers guidance, energy, instinctual wisdom, and most of all, hope just when it’s needed most, leaving each of these survivors persuaded that their deliverance stemmed not from their own effort but from something else.
Reinhold Messer, the first person to climb Everest alone, describes to Geiger how a presence just at the outskirts of his vision led him down and “out of the impossible” when he was in desperate trouble high upon the world’s tallest mountain. Ron DiFrancesco, the last survivor out of the South Tower on 9/11, explains how he was lifted up then led down by the “vivid sense of a physical presence.” Climber James Sevigny recounts how, when lost in the Canadian Rockies after breaking his back in a fall, he was guided to safety by a similar unseen force. “All decisions made subsequent (to the accident),” Sevigny says, “were made by the presence. I was merely taking instructions.” Cave diver, Stephanie Schwabe, 100 feet below the surface, alone in the darkness of an undersea cavern in the Bahamas, having lost her guideline to the surface, suddenly feels the presence of another being, one who transmits renewed strength and a sense of calm resolve to her, directing her back to her line and guiding her ascent to the surface.
Famed explorer Ernest Shackleton, recording the story of the loss of his ship Endurance in the ice of Antarctica, recounted this about the last leg of his survival journey with two of his companions: “It seemed to me often that we were four not three.” Similarly, aviator Charles Lindbergh, explaining how he remained awake in the Spirit of St. Louis as it crossed the Atlantic, wrote: “The fuselage behind me became filled with ghostly presences, vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me.” Alpinist Frank Smythe, trapped alone within the Death Zone on Everest, reported being joined by a presence so real that when he broke open his last remaining food, a mint cake, he carefully divided it into two and “turned around with one half in my hand to offer the other to my companion.”
Geiger tells the story of Joshua Slocum, who encountered a violent storm during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe alone. Incapacitated and lost, Slocum said he was visited by a “strange guest… a tall man taking the helm,” who then steered his vessel through the storm for the next 48 hours. Explorer Wallace Cambridge, lost in the interior of Uganda, later confided to a friend that each time he topped a ridge, he saw a man going over the next. Then, as he was carried along the currents of a river, every time he turned another bend, he saw the man again disappearing around the next. Pennsylvania miners trapped underground in 1967 gave accounts of a woman with long hair kneeling at prayer, calming them as they awaited rescue. Astronaut Jim Leninger, aboard the trouble-plagued Russian space station Mir in 1997, spoke of a reassuring presence residing just at the periphery of his vision throughout the mission.
Perhaps the phenomenon is, as some explain, merely a sensory illusion, a perception dysfunction about one’s own body position, a hallucination caused by exertion, monotony, cold, and stress, or the body simply inventing a way to survive. Even so, as Geiger writes, “it doesn’t take away from the experience itself.” This presence, he concludes, this deliverer, this force for survival, is no less real simply because it defies our explanation.
Rescuing God—Thank You for sending an angel, a messenger, a deliverer, to save Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—and somehow, in some way, so many others. Amen.
