Still Before The Sea

Exodus 14:10–18

There is a particular kind of fear that comes when you have staked everything on a promise and the promise has not yet arrived.

I began The Caffeine Academy with almost nothing. No building, no budget, no team — only the conviction that God had put it in my hands and that it must come to pass. I prayed. I pressed on. And I was afraid the entire time.

I have not written honestly about those months. There were stretches when I sank into depression, when anxiety sat on my chest before dawn and told me the same thing every morning: you cannot deliver this. I had already carried the crushing rent at StarVista and watched it nearly finish us. I knew exactly what it feels like to have the water rise. And I did not believe I was equal to what I had been entrusted with. I was Peter — not the Peter who stepped out, but the one who looked at the wind and began to go under.

Israel stood at that shoreline and said something I recognise in my own voice: better we had served the Egyptians than die in the desert (v.12). Better the old walls. Better the familiar chains. At least in Changi I knew what each day would cost me.

Moses did not hand them a sword. He told them to stand still and watch.

And then — the lease grant. Jonathan opening the Gateway space at a cost no landlord in Singapore would have offered. Leaders arriving who did not need to come. Funds raised. The budget matching. The fit-out taking shape. I did not engineer a single one of those. They were the works of a hand that was never mine.

I go into prison and tell men that God fights for them, while I am still learning to believe it for myself.

Stillness is not doing nothing. Israel still had to walk down into that seabed. Stillness is refusing to dig my own escape route while God is already parting the water in front of me.

I am trying to stand still, and know that Jesus is my God who delivereth.