25 Stories Down

It was the summer of 1994 when my wife and our children and I traveled through central Türkiye. The road carried us across the dry plateau until we reached Cappadocia—a landscape so strange and beautiful it looked as though it had been shaped by another hand. Wind and rain had carved towers and ridges of volcanic ash into shapes that seemed half sculpture, half dream. Every horizon was a skyline of stone candles, their soft tufa sides streaked with light and shadow.

We found a small hotel in the village of Göreme, and to our children’s delight it was carved directly into the mountainside. Our rooms tunneled into the rock, cool even in the heat of day. The walls were rough but clean, the lamps flickered softly, and at night the wind moaned through the narrow valley like a living voice. Somewhere far above, stars glittered in a sky so clear it seemed newly made. I remember lying awake, thinking how strange it felt to be inside a mountain—and yet to feel utterly safe.

The next morning, our host told us about the underground cities scattered beneath the region. He spoke with pride and reverence, as though describing the veins of the earth itself. Whole communities once lived below us, he said—families, farmers, monks, teachers, and priests. There were tunnels connecting village to village, rooms for wine, for prayer, for children, and for hope. I listened, amazed, wondering what it would be like to live your faith twenty-five stories down.

Later that day we visited one of those places—Derinkuyu. From the surface it looked like nothing: a nondescript entrance in a dry field, a few stone steps disappearing into shadow. But once you took those first steps, the world changed. The light faded. The air cooled. The sound of the wind disappeared, replaced by the faint echo of footsteps and voices ahead. We descended carefully, each turn bringing a deeper quiet.

It’s said Derinkuyu stretches nearly two hundred feet underground, about twenty-five stories deep. That’s taller than many city buildings, but in reverse—a skyscraper of faith built downward instead of upward. Archeologists believe as many as twenty thousand people once lived there. They had stables for their animals, wells for water, kitchens with blackened ceilings, and massive round stone doors that could roll into place if danger approached. Air shafts—narrow, vertical arteries—ran from top to bottom, bringing breath to the hidden city. It was ingenious, intricate, and astonishingly human.

But what moved me most wasn’t the engineering. It was the realization that this vast underworld was built not for glory, but for survival. It was faith’s last refuge. Early Christians had come here to hide—from persecution, from soldiers, from the madness of empire. They sang their hymns in the dark, whispered prayers where no sunlight reached, and raised their children by candlelight. Even twenty-five stories down, they kept believing that God could hear them.

> “If I make my bed in the depths,” the psalmist wrote, “You are there.”

Standing there, I could almost hear their echo. Every breath of that ancient air seemed to carry their courage. I imagined the hush before worship, the flicker of oil lamps, the murmur of psalms rising through the stone. They must have wondered, as we all do at times, whether light could find them in such a place. Yet somehow it always did.

The guide led us through narrow passages, our shoulders brushing the walls. At one turn, he stopped to show us a rough-hewn cross carved into the rock. “Church,” he said simply. The room was small—no pews, no pulpit, just an altar-shaped ledge and the faint outlines of frescoes long faded by centuries of smoke. I stood in that humble chapel, thinking of the words of Jesus: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” And I realized how upside-down the kingdom of God truly is. These people had survived precisely because they could keep their city hidden—yet their light, the one thing they meant to preserve, had never gone out.

They hid for safety, not shame. And what the world couldn’t see, heaven never lost sight of.

In that moment, I thought of how often our faith journeys take us downward. We spend so much of life trying to climb higher—upward in success, upward in approval, upward into light. But there are times when God takes us down instead: down into humility, down into silence, down into places where we can’t see much at all. Down into the heart of things.

Faith, it turns out, doesn’t need altitude—it needs endurance.

Those Cappadocian believers may have lived underground, but their faith was rooted in eternity. They dug deep because they trusted that God could reach even deeper. Twenty-five stories of stone could not muffle the sound of worship that rose through the tunnels. Their songs were quiet, but they traveled upward like smoke through the vents of creation.