Mats spread over the sand, blue plastic stools sinking under everyone's weight. The water sat flat and pale behind us. The casuarina trees threw long shade across the group. We had brought the residents out for the evening, away from the ward and the same four walls. Games, food, the ordinary business of an outing.
Then someone wanted to sing, and sang "God Will Make a Way".
Nobody planned it. Nobody, including the one singing, stopped to weigh what the words were claiming. The song came up the way a song does when it has lived in you long enough.
The people singing were the ones whose situations had not shifted in years. Some had families who no longer visited. Some had waited on a discharge date that kept moving. A few sang along. Most just listened, and one or two mouthed the words with their eyes shut.
A promise that large got sung by a group who could not have defended it, and none of us paused to check whether we had the right.
The words were bigger than anyone's grasp of them that evening. They were still true.
We tell the Red Sea story as a story about faith. Israel's own account is less flattering.
"They said to Moses, 'Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt?'" (Exodus 14:11)
Chariots behind them, open water ahead, and their settled view was that God had brought them out to bury them. They had watched Egypt crack open plague by plague. None of it reached them at the shoreline. Fear has a short memory.
The command came anyway. "Tell the Israelites to move on." (Exodus 14:15) Toward the water, while it was still water, spoken to people who had just said they would rather have stayed slaves.
"Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. 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 14:21-22)
All that night. Hours of wind in the dark, the ground going firm so slowly that nobody standing there could have told you anything was happening. God was already working on the crossing while Israel's opinion of him was at its lowest. They walked into that seabed with their complaint still in their mouths.
The water held anyway, because the holding never rested on the quality of their belief.
The promise did not wait for Israel to believe it. It did not wait for us either.
You cannot always reason your way to hope. On the bad days your thinking is the least trustworthy thing you own. It builds the case against you and shuts every exit, and it does this with real skill.
Something older than your thinking can still open your mouth. A hymn line learned at nine years old. A verse your mother said over the washing. It surfaces without asking permission, and it says more than you are able to argue for right now.
One psalm carries the same split. "Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God." (Psalm 42:5) The writer talks to a part of himself that has gone under, and tells it something the rest of him cannot yet feel. "I will yet praise him" is a promise made in advance, from inside the heaviness. He sings before he believes it too.
The gap does not make the singing dishonest. Call it a testimony you did not know you were giving. The promise went in deeper than the despair, and on a Saturday evening by the sea it came back out.
A song cured nobody on that beach. The ward was still waiting at the end of the day. The discharge dates had not moved. But for the length of three verses, one voice said something true over people who could not have said it for themselves, and it got said.
A promise you can only mouth is still a promise.
Whatever you sang last Sunday without feeling it, whatever verse surfaces in you at three in the morning when you have no defence for it, that is not empty. The wind blows all night over water that has not moved yet. And a promise you can only mouth is still a promise, spoken over you by a God who was never waiting for you to be convinced first.
Here is the song that came up on the beach that evening: 'God Will Make a Way' by Don Moen. You do not have to feel every line for it to be true over you.
