The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. – Exodus 14:22
We have a saying in our house:
Just keep moving toward the beach.
When things get tough, when we’re overwhelmed, when we feel like we can’t even see (let alone reach) the finish line, we tell ourselves that all we can do is just keep moving toward the beach.
On occasion it’s a battlecry, equal parts bellow and roar as we charge ahead. But most often, it’s an honest, vulnerable, prayer whispered again and again as we tread slowly forward.
Just keep moving toward the beach first came to us in the middle of an exhausting and seemingly endless season a few years ago. A prolonged, stormy stretch that sent seismic tremors across everything as a constant, sobering reminder of how very little in life we can control. During this time, we stood in the yard on a chilly fall day, carefully sifting through the details of the latest upheaval. We talked, schemed, and strategized, trying to devise a corrective course of action—some plan or means that would somehow right the ship again until the inevitable next storm.
As we stared off into the horizon, we quickly realized, we had nothing.
Not a plan.
Not a thought.
Not a single, solitary clue.
Not a move left, except slowly and blindly forward.
I took a deep breath and whispered, “We have to just keep moving toward the beach.” Scott knows that my busy, nonlinear mind makes me prone to random, non-sequiturs, so he said nothing and waited for more words to follow. Because, with me, more words pretty much always follow.
I told him that lately, I’d thought a lot about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. What it must have felt like for them as they pressed forward, inevitably wedging themselves into that tiny, rapidly disappearing space between a raging army of chariots and a sprawling, infinite sea. I could feel the fear and dread they must have felt as they trudged forward, powerless, overwhelmed, and bone-weary as the unwilling middle of a total dead-end sandwich, realizing they had no other option except to just keep moving toward the beach.
With what must have seemed like certain death both in front of and behind them, they had nothing.
Not a plan.
Not a thought.
Not a single, solitary clue.
Not a move left, except slowly and blindly forward.
When, suddenly, the seas parted.
Today’s Soft Never
Today, we’re shifting the lens and limits we so often tend to put on God. We’re putting a Soft Never on the belief that we always need to know exactly what’s coming next — and exactly how we will handle it. Instead, when we’re stressed, or anxious, or hitting what seems like a dead-end from every angle, we’ll remember to “just keep moving toward the beach,” trusting God to part whatever sea looms before us.
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