Somebody Stayed
The word for Monday, August 3, 2026 is Somebody Stayed.
The anchor verse is Genesis 3:8.
On July 23, at thirteen minutes past one in the afternoon, a crowd stood on the sand at Coney Island and chanted a name.
Pancake. Pancake. Pancake.
Children had made signs. People came down to the beach outside the New York Aquarium to watch an eleven pound sea turtle go back into the Atlantic Ocean. Somebody set it at the edge of the water. It swam. Within seconds it was gone.
That is the video. Thirteen seconds, and everybody cheering.
Now go back eight months.
November 22 of last year, Duck Harbor Beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, out on Cape Cod. Somebody walking a cold beach in late November found a young Kemp's ridley sea turtle lying there, barely moving.
They call it cold stunning. When the water drops too fast, a sea turtle cannot warm itself back up. The heart slows. The blood slows. The animal loses the ability to swim and loses the ability to eat. Left where it lies, it dies. Kemp's ridleys are among the most endangered sea turtles on earth, and this one was going.
Volunteers walk those beaches every fall looking for exactly that.
So Pancake got carried off the sand. Emergency care at the New England Aquarium. On the third of December it moved to a care facility in Westhampton Beach, New York, along with twenty four other turtles pulled off the same cold beaches.
And then came seven months.
Nobody chanted in January. No crowd showed up in March. Nobody filmed the part where a person walked into a room on an ordinary Tuesday and fed an animal that could not feed itself, and came back the next day and did it again, and kept doing it all winter with no way of knowing how it would turn out.
Seven months of that. Then thirteen seconds of applause.
We have the ratio backward in our heads.
We think GOD shows up for the thirteen seconds. The scan comes back clear. The offer arrives. The phone rings and this time it is good news. That is where we expect HIM. So when we hit a stretch of months where nothing moves, we assume HE stepped out of the room.
Open the third chapter of Genesis and watch what happens right after everything breaks.
Adam and Eve have already eaten. It has already gone wrong. There is no fixing it and no taking it back.
And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
Read that again slowly, because it is easy to miss.
GOD came anyway.
They were in the trees, hiding. Nothing about them was ready to be found. And the first thing GOD does after the worst day in the story is take a walk in the direction of the people who caused it.
HE did not wait for them to be better. HE did not wait for them to come out from behind the leaves. HE walked, in the cool of the day, at the usual hour, the way HE always had.
That is the sound I want you to have in your ear today.
Not thunder. Footsteps.
And when the time came for GOD to deal with all of it, HE did not arrive for a highlight reel. Christ said it plainly. Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.
Look at how HE spent that will. About thirty years passed before anyone wrote down a word HE said. Three decades of ordinary days in a small town, in a workshop, with sawdust and neighbors and nothing anybody thought to record. The years nobody watched were most of the years.
HE was not waiting for HIS life to start. That was the life.
So here is what I can tell you, and I want to be careful about what I do not tell you.
I cannot promise you a release day. I cannot tell you the winter has a length, or that yours ends in July. And I will not tell you the hard thing you are in is making you stronger. Sometimes it is only hard, and saying otherwise to a person in the middle of it does damage.
What the record shows is this. GOD walks in the middle. In the garden after the fall. In the ordinary years in Nazareth. On the Tuesdays nobody films.
The walking is not the reward waiting at the end of the winter. The walking has been going on the whole time.
One more thing about Pancake.
There is a small satellite tag fixed to that shell. The crowd went home. The signs went in the trash. And somebody is still watching where that turtle goes.
The attention did not stop when the applause did.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one in month four of something that had a clear beginning and has no visible end.
- 🙏 To the one who was told the hard season was making you stronger, and it did not.
- 🙏 To the one behind the leaves, certain the footsteps stopped a long time ago.
- 🙏 To the one doing quiet work in a room nobody films, wondering whether it counts.
Grace and Peace.