The Rip Current at Cocoa Beach

Every summer along Florida's Atlantic coast, lifeguards respond to the same tragic scene. A swimmer gets caught in a rip current — that narrow, powerful channel of water rushing straight out to sea — and panics. They turn toward shore and swim with everything they have. Arms churning, lungs burning, they fight the current stroke by stroke. Some of them drown, not because they lacked strength, but because they spent every ounce of it fighting in the wrong direction.

The counterintuitive truth that saves lives is this: stop fighting and swim parallel to the shore. The rip current is narrow. Swim sideways and it releases you. The sea that felt like an enemy becomes navigable, and the exhausted swimmer walks back up the beach alive.

Israel at the Red Sea knew a different version of this terror — Pharaoh's chariots thundering behind them, open water ahead, and no visible way out. Every human instinct screamed: run, fight, do something. But Moses spoke words that cut against every survival reflex: "Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today... The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still."

The hardest command God ever gives is often the simplest: stop. Not because the danger isn't real — the chariots were real, the sea was real — but because the battle belongs to Someone far more capable than you. The same God who parted those waters is asking you today to stop exhausting yourself against the current, and trust Him to make a way through.