The Cry That Went Up

Exodus 2:23–3:10

There were months at TCE when I could not breathe. The ledger was red, rent was due, wages had to be paid to men and women who had nowhere else to go, and every prayer felt as though it stopped at the ceiling. I know the sigh of Exodus 2:23. It is the sound a man makes when he has run out of clever answers and is left only with his hands.

And my hands had failed. The Star Vista outlet did not work. I had signed a lease I could not carry and promised our Restarters a future I was no longer sure I could fund. We exited that lease as a failure, not a strategy. If the café ministry was going to survive on my competence, it was already finished.

Notice what Israel did not do. They did not organise a rebellion. They did not negotiate with Pharaoh. They sighed, and they cried out, and the text says simply that the cry went up. Egypt did not soften. The bricks did not get lighter. But God heard, God remembered, God looked, and God knew. Then He went to a shepherd in the wilderness with a stick in his hand and said, I will send you.

Moses was a failed man. He had killed an Egyptian, fled his people, and spent forty years minding sheep. Like Moses, I was also a failed man. His hands were not the point. The burning bush was.

I have watched the Lord do the same with us. When the Star Vista lease should have crushed us, Ivy came, and with mercy and grace she saved us. When the funds ran dry, John and Michelle and many more jumped in to provide. Equipment we could no longer use found its way to another mission's work instead of a scrapyard. None of that was my planning. I had run out of planning. It was His Hand, moving through people I never thought to ask.

That is the strange mercy of failure. When my hands hold the outcome, I get the credit and the fear. When my hands fail and He still delivers, there is only one place the glory can go.

If you are sighing today, whether in a cell, a halfway house, or a business that is bleeding, know this: the cry goes up. It is heard. Our part is to keep working with what we have, keep waiting without despair, and keep watching for rescue from the places we least expect. He does not need capable hands. He needs surrendered ones.