Finding Hope After Miners Rescue

How often have you heard about hope in the past few years? And in these tough times how often has our hope become reality? Not often enough. Or so we think.

Well this week, the world rallied around hope for 33 men who were trapped in a mine in Chile. Who worried, in the words of one family member, that they weren't sure that someone would even come look for them. Hope became resolve and resolve became success and in that boisterous moment of supreme human joy their hopes -- and ours -- were realized. Thanksgiving had come early.

In a world full of conflict, in a world driven by controversy, accustomed to almost devotional study of man-made and natural disaster, it was as if an angel had touched us on our shoulder. And awakened us to the pleasure of reveling in the joy of other humans who we will never meet and whose experience we will never understand.

We realized, as we do from time to time, that we could be refreshed and renewed by other tears of happiness. It seemed to provoke the comforting realization that, yes, someone would come look for us, too, in the dark recesses of the earth.

Like you I was overjoyed. But then reality returned -- the burdens of our daily life. I asked out loud, here at Fox, how as a nation do we dare to hope in the face of foreclosure, unemployment, family and friends in harm's way in times of war? And a wise newsman here at Fox said to me, "Peter, sometimes all it takes is looking just a bit more closely at the world around us."

Like a twelve-year-old boy in Keller, Texas who this week came out of a coma he'd been in for 5 days.Young Jack Pittman-Heglund, collapsed of a heart attack at home, his mother pounded life into his heart and air into his lungs and he spent five days in a coma. But this past Tuesday, Jack woke up and gave his doctors a big thumbs up. And returned the kiss of life to his mother. They are now calling him "The Comeback Kid."

In August three-year-old Alessandra Tafoya couldn't rouse her father who collapsed in their home. Alessandra, who knew from her family that the Manteca, California Fire Station 243 was a safe place to go for help walked two blocks to the fire station on her own and led the firefighters home -- saving her unconscious father's life.

These events prove, to me, that very often from our worst fears spring our greatest hopes.

For each of us, our fears and our hopes are different. So it is rare that this week all the cameras and all the eyes of the world were focused on one hole in the ground. -- A virtual delivery room for our greatest expectations -- where the earth looked like it was giving birth to hope, hour after hour, miner after miner. It shows how we can focus our own lens a little more closely on the things around us. To listen a little more carefully.

Because if we take the time to look and to listen we can find hope in a 12-year-old Texas boy or 3-year-old California girl who may live just around the corner.

Peter Johnson Jr. is a lawyer and Fox News legal analyst.