The Night the Beach Began to Move

In the summer of 2019, a twenty-year-old marine biology intern named Adriana arrived at Ostional Beach in Costa Rica to help monitor olive ridley sea turtle nests. Her supervisor, a weathered biologist named Carlos who had spent thirty years on that coastline, told her the most important skill she would learn was listening.

Three nights into her rotation, Adriana woke to a faint scratching beneath the sand outside her tent. She radioed Carlos. "Something's at the supply bin." He checked and sent her back to sleep. An hour later, she heard it again — a soft, rhythmic stirring just below the surface. She radioed once more. "Probably a land crab," he said. But when she called a third time, describing the sound more carefully, Carlos went quiet. Then his voice came back low and urgent: "That's not crabs. That's the nest. Get to station four — now."

She arrived just as two hundred tiny hatchlings began breaking through the sand in the moonlight, scrambling toward the Pacific. The sound she kept hearing but could not name was the very thing she had come to witness.

Young Samuel heard a voice three times in the darkness and ran to Eli, certain it was the old priest calling him. It took Eli — the seasoned one — to finally recognize what was happening. "It is the Lord," he told the boy. And he gave Samuel the only words that mattered: "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."

Sometimes God calls not in thunder but in a stirring we cannot quite name — and we need someone further along in faith to help us recognize who is speaking.