Being a chaplain, father and husband can be exhausting. I cannot tell you the number of times I have come home from work just hoping to survive dinner and bedtime stories and make it to bed.

For many of us, bed is no sanctuary either. When we close our eyes we get to relive the pressures of the day or the memories of tragedy past and present.

As if this were not hard enough, many of us are pulled out of bed by the lure or the ring of one of our three phones. Each beckoning us to fight another skirmish. There is always another battle to fight when you are in the Army.

So what do we do when we come to the end of the line? When our energy has run out, our passion has left and our spouse is tired of our never being physically or emotionally present?

I was given some hope in my devotional time recently as I was reading the book of Exodus.

Exodus, Chapter 14, is one of my most favorite chapters in the Bible. God’s people have just been liberated from living under pharaoh’s tyranny. No longer slaves, they are free men and women. Soon the journey becomes long and life in the desert is hard. Suddenly they find themselves at the end of the line facing the Red Sea.

To make things worse, when they turn around they see pharaoh’s army closing in on them. They are trapped. They begin to panic and wish they had never been liberated, only to die in the dessrt.

Then, in verse 14, the Lord gives Moses a message to tell the people: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

This must have sounded ridiculous to God’s people. Trapped and being pursued by the world’s strongest army, there seemed to be no hope.

But then God did the impossible.

God divided the sea. He allowed His people to walk across, and drowned the most powerful army in the world.

Too many times, I’ve tried fighting every battle forgetting that I can do nothing without God’s strength.

I pray as a last resort when I come to the end of my strength instead of realizing that God is the source of my strength. Sometimes, I rob my Family of my presence because I succumb to the pressures of the expectations of others. Sometimes I lack the courage to say “no” and be still.

As I write this, I realize I don’t know what your impossible struggles are. I don’t know what battles you are fighting within the strongest army in the world.

But this is what I do know. The Lord will fight for you if you ask him. All you have to do is get out of his way and be still.