The Crossing You Didn't Feel

"...though your footprints were not seen." - Psalm 77:19 (NIV)

Have you ever caught the moment you fall asleep? No one ever has. No matter how closely you watch for it, the instant arrives without you, and you only know it happened because you woke. Some changes in us arrive the same way. You keep looking for the moment everything changed, and find no moment at all, only the difference.

Asaph, who led worship in Israel, spent a sleepless night recalling what God had done in the past. When he turned toward the oldest memory of his people, the words came differently: "Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen" (Psalm 77:19). They had truly crossed the sea, even though no footprints remained to prove it. Maybe our own story is closer to that than we knew.

If God had brought us through something that big, surely we would have felt it. Yet through the prophet Hosea, He remembered teaching His child to walk. Ephraim learned one step at a time, lifted by arms he mistook for his own strength: "It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them" (Hosea 11:3). Maybe that is how the deepest changes come, while we are still learning to stand. What if the crossing you were waiting for was never meant to announce itself?

Jacob, who had deceived his father and was fleeing his brother's anger, left with nothing resolved. He slept with a stone beneath his head in a place he had no name for yet. When morning came, the stone and the ground were where they had been, but everything was different: "When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, 'Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it'" (Genesis 28:16). He had not felt God draw near. Morning showed him what the night had carried him through without his knowing.

So today, we do not need to search for the moment we crossed. The crossing has already happened, and the water is under us now. There are desires we didn't put there ourselves, an attention to God that grew quietly, a sense of His nearness that wasn't there before. Maybe the pull we could not name was Him, drawing us nearer than we knew. "The LORD confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them" (Psalm 25:14). He confides. The God who worked unseen does not intend to stay unknown. His footprints were not seen. And here you are. There is yet more.

Prayer

Father, help us see what we missed. Thank You for carrying us through what we could not feel, and draw us into confidence in Your nearness today. There is yet more. Amen.