Footprints You Cannot See

There is a particular kind of tiredness that shows up in the middle of October. The excitement of a new semester is gone, the exams are piling up, and the plans you made in August do not look the way you imagined. You are doing your best, but when you look behind you, it is hard to point to where God has been. And when you look ahead, the road disappears into fog. If that is where you are today, Psalm 77 was written for you.

The writer of this psalm is not having a good day. He says his soul refuses to be comforted. He cannot sleep. He asks the kind of questions many of us are afraid to ask out loud: Has God's love run out? Has he forgotten to be gracious? Notice that these questions are right there in Scripture, unedited. Faith in the Bible is not the absence of doubt. It is what you do with your doubt. And what he does is remember. He thinks back to the Exodus, when Israel stood trapped between Pharaoh's army and the sea.

Then comes this strange and beautiful line. God's way went through the sea, his path through the great waters, yet his footprints were unseen. Think about that. When you walk on a beach, your steps are visible for a moment, then the water comes and smooths them away. The people of Israel walked through the Red Sea on dry ground, and as soon as they had passed, the waters closed behind them. There was no trail to point to. Only when they reached the other side could they look back and know that God had been leading them the whole time, even through the part that looked like a dead end.

That might be the most honest description of faith we have. Often we do not see God's footprints while we are walking. We see them later. The job you did not get, the friendship that ended, the class you almost dropped, the season of waiting that felt wasted: many of us can only recognize his hand once we are on the other shore. So today, you do not have to feel God's presence in order to trust it. Just take the next step, and remember a time when he has carried you through water before. Write down one place where you can now see he was faithful. Let that be your evidence for what you cannot see yet.