For most of my life, I looked at close calls as coincidence. Moments where something almost happened… but didn’t. A turn made at the right time. A decision changed at the last second. A strange feeling that interrupted panic just long enough to avoid disaster. At the time, they felt random. Later, they began to feel like something else entirely.

 

The Scarlet Cord came from realizing how many times my story could have ended differently.

 

Not because I was always wise.
Not because I always made good decisions.
But because somehow mercy kept appearing quietly in the middle of chaos.

 

One of those moments happened while scuba diving in the Hood Canal.

I had gone far deeper than I was trained for, driven by the kind of confidence young men often mistake for control. Around one hundred and twenty feet down, something went wrong.

 

The deeper water grew darker, colder, heavier. My dive partner had already begun ascending, and suddenly I found myself alone beneath the surface, fighting panic while realizing I could not tell which direction safety even was anymore.

 

Underwater panic is different than panic on land.

You cannot shout.
You cannot run.
All you hear is your own breathing, reminding you your air supply is limited.

 

For a moment, I believed I was going to die there.

Then in the middle of the fear, a calm thought interrupted everything:

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“Slow down. Calm down. You know what to do.”

 

That single moment of clarity changed everything. I stopped fighting the water long enough to remember my training, inflated my vest, and slowly rose back toward the surface.

 

What stayed with me afterward was not the fear.

It was the calm.

 

Over time, I started noticing a pattern like that throughout my life.

Moments where chaos should have completely taken over…
but didn’t.

 

This realization also forced me to revisit my family differently.

 

My mother always believed there was more happening in the world than what we could see. She carried stories of warnings, dreams, intuitions, and moments she could never fully explain. My father carried similar instincts in his own way through his Native traditions and his belief that life leaves signs if we are willing to notice them.

 

For years, I did not know what to do with those stories.

Part of me doubted them.
Part of me could not ignore them.

 

But as I began reading Scripture more seriously, something shifted.

Acts 17:27 says:

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                         “He is not far from any one of us.”

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I stopped seeing those moments as competing ideas or strange family stories and started seeing them as signposts. Small reminders that God had been near long before I knew how to recognize Him personally.

 

Grace was present before I had language for it.

 

Protection does not always arrive the same way.

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Sometimes protection looks supernatural.
Sometimes it looks like a steady voice in a fearful room.
Sometimes it looks like someone simply staying beside you when everything feels uncertain.

 

One of the many moments that shaped this song happened when I was sixteen.

A friend wanted to break into a baseball card shop and steal enough valuables to make quick money. Growing up without much, the temptation felt real. And while he explained the plan, something inside me kept repeating:

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“Don’t go.”

It was not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just steady.

I listened.

 

A week later, both boys involved were arrested after the robbery escalated into car theft and prison time. Looking back, that moment matters to me because what protected me was not maturity.
It was mercy.

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The older I get, the more I realize grace often looks exactly like that:
a quiet interruption before disaster fully unfolds.

 

That realization eventually led me to the image of the scarlet cord in Scripture.

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In Exodus, families marked their doors with the blood of a lamb during Passover.

 

In Joshua, Rahab hung a scarlet cord from her window so her household would be spared when judgment came upon the city.

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A small mark.
A simple thread.
But it represented trust.

That image became deeply personal to me.

 

Life often feels like standing inside a fragile house while chaos moves outside the door. Storms come. Diagnoses arrive. Accidents happen. Relationships break. Fear spreads faster than reason. And sometimes faith does not immediately stop the storm.

Sometimes faith simply says:

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Stay still.
Trust the cord.
Hold onto mercy until morning comes.

 

That is what this song became for me.

A song about quiet trust.

 

The kind of faith that does not always move mountains loudly…
but sits patiently in the dark believing God is still holding the thread.

 

The older I get, the less I believe control is what keeps us safe.

We are far more fragile than we realize.

 

But somehow…
we are also far more held than we understand.

And maybe grace is not always God removing danger from our lives.

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Maybe sometimes grace is simply the scarlet cord still hanging there…
after the storm should have already taken everything else away.