Footsteps In The Sea

Two in the morning is a specific hour and everybody who has had a run of them knows the difference between two and three.

He is at the window. Not looking at anything. The street has a light out at the far end and has had since the summer and he has stopped noticing it except at this hour, when it is the only thing to look at.

The thing that has him awake is a system. Not a person. He has been careful about that from the start, because he has watched what happens to men who make it a person.

Fourteen months. Correspondence, a reference number, a review, a second review that was, as far as he can establish, the same review. He has a file. He knows the file better than anybody in the organization that produced it.

What has changed recently is not the situation. What has changed is that he used to be able to see a path. There was always a next thing: another letter, another route, somebody else to ask. He could hold a shape in his head of how this might come out.

He cannot see one now. And this is the part he has not said to his wife: he stopped pretending about a fortnight ago, and the stopping was almost a relief, and that frightens him.

The sentence at the window is not there is no hope. It is more exact than that: I can no longer see any way this goes, and I have stopped inventing one to get through the day.

You know that window. It might be a system, or an illness, or a family situation with no visible next move. You used to be able to imagine the road. Now you cannot, and you have stopped trying, and nobody around you knows that you stopped.

The way that could not be traced

There is a psalm written by a man having exactly your kind of night, and it says so plainly: he is remembering God in the night, and his spirit is overwhelmed, and he asks whether the mercy is gone forever. That is not a psalm of confidence. It is the record of somebody at a window.

And then it turns, and the turn is one line.

Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.Psalm 77:19

Read what that says about the road God took through the biggest rescue in their history. His way was in the sea. Not over it, not around it. In it. And afterwards, when it was done and everybody was across, there was no track to look at. Water closes. Thy footsteps are not known.

Which means the people who were rescued could not have drawn the route in advance and could not point to it afterwards.

You are being led by a God whose paths do not show, and the absence of a visible way has never once meant the absence of one. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man at two in the morning, and the Holy Spirit who has been awake in this house with you for fourteen months is the evidence that the leading has not been suspended for want of a road you can see.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic at that window. If His way is in the sea, then a fortnight of seeing nothing is information about how much water there is between you and the far side. It is not the measure of where God goes, and it never had the standing to become that.

Not being able to see it is not the same as failing

Here is the second thing, and it is the bit that has been quietly costing you.

The ability to imagine a way out has been treated, somewhere in you, as part of the job. His Spirit never once assigned it. As long as you could hold a shape in your head, you were still doing something. When that went, it felt like the last thing you were contributing had gone too.

But nobody in Scripture was ever asked to visualize the route. The people at the sea were not asked to picture it. They were told to stand still and watch, and then to go forward on ground that appeared in the moment and disappeared behind them.

You have been carried through all fourteen of those months, and the carrying did not depend on you being able to see the shape of it. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in this rather than waiting for you to think of a fifth route.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to hope harder, or to picture the outcome, or to speak something into being. And nothing here will name what happens, because nobody knows, and a promised route from a page you found at two in the morning is worth exactly nothing.

And say this too: fourteen months of two in the morning is worth telling a doctor about, and telling your wife that you stopped pretending is worth more than most of what is in that file.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought at a dark window. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not held at a window for a fortnight. And the thing in the way is not the organization. It is a sentence: I can no longer see any way this goes. Which is true, and which the psalmist said in almost the same words, and nobody has ever answered it out loud for you.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority standing in the dark. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of a plan you had.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than weariness, and there are nights when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.