Low Tide Every Morning

At ten past six Ada walks down to the water, because it is the only fifteen minutes of the day that nobody has already spent.

The tide is all the way out. It goes out a long way here. What is left is a wide brown shine of flats with the light just coming across it sideways, and the little channels running silver, and two boats lying over on their sides in the mud like animals asleep. It smells like salt and iron and something faintly green.

A heron works the far channel with terrible patience.

Ada stands where the grass stops and the sand starts and she does not sit down, because if she sits down she is not sure she gets up.

Here is her day, and she can run the whole thing in her head in about four seconds, because it is the same day.

Six thirty, the belt, and getting Gil around to the edge of the bed. Eggs, because eggs are the one thing his left hand manages without the fork going over. The blue rubber band exercises, twelve each side, and he counts out loud and she counts silently along with him and they both know she is counting. The shower chair. The lotion on the heel that will not heal. The crossword at ten, which she reads out loud, and he gets the long ones and she gets none of them, and that is the best twenty minutes of the day. Lunch. The slump at three where his mood goes down like a curtain and there is nothing to be done for it. Supper. The chair. The bed. The belt again.

Fourteen months. Something like four hundred of them now.

She loves him. That is not in question and it never has been, and if you asked her she would look at you like you had asked whether the sun was still up there.

But somewhere along the line her hands got so good at it that they stopped needing her. She can do the belt while thinking about the pharmacy. She can do the lotion while planning the eggs. She has become, and she would never say this out loud to another living person, extremely efficient at loving her husband, and there is a flatness in her chest most mornings that frightens her more than the fourteen months do.

The heron gets something. The light comes up another notch and the flats go from brown to a color that is almost gold.

Ada looks at all that empty mud going out half a mile, and she thinks, that is about right.

You have stood somewhere like that. Maybe not water. Maybe the parking lot outside work at seven, or the bottom of the stairs, or the driveway with the engine off. The day in front of you is the day behind you. The care you give is real and you have never once considered stopping. And the thing you cannot say to anybody, the thing that would come out wrong every time you tried, is that you have gone mechanical, and you are afraid of what that means about you.

Low Tide Is Not The Bay Leaving

Let me start where you actually are, because starting anywhere else would be a waste of both our time.

You are being renewed on the inside on a morning when absolutely nothing on the outside has moved. 2 Corinthians 4:16 says that in the present tense and it says it as a repeating thing, day by day, and the Spirit is not standing there waiting for you to produce the renewing yourself before breakfast.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Look at the honesty of that sentence. Paul does not pretend the outward part is fine. He says it is going the other way, plainly, with no varnish on it at all. And then he puts a second thing beside it, running at the same time, in the opposite direction. Two true things at once. Two weathers in one man.

You have not gone cold, and mechanical is not another word for cold. The Spirit knows the difference between those two better than you do at ten past six, and it is written into Galatians 6:9 without one word of scolding for the weary: do not grow weary in doing good. That verse is spoken to tired people. It is not a rebuke aimed at them.

Here is what mechanical actually is. It is what happens to a skill when it is repeated four hundred times. Your hands learned the belt. Your hands learned the lotion and the count of twelve. That is competence, and competence always feels like less than it is, because the feeling that used to come with the effort was mostly the effort. Take the effort out and the feeling goes quiet, and the love is exactly where it was, doing the belt at six thirty.

You were made for tides and not for a flood that never goes back out. That is Scripture and not poetry: His word gives mercies that are new every morning, Lamentations 3:23, and the Holy Spirit is what makes them actually arrive at a house.

A bay at low tide has not been abandoned. Nothing has left. The water is doing the thing water does, and the flats going out half a mile in the early light are not evidence of loss, they are evidence of a system that has been running since before anybody lived here.

Renewed Is Not A Feeling, It Is A Delivery

And one thing plainly before we go further, because this is the category where it has to be said out loud.

If what is happening in your house is harming you, endurance is not the word for it and it is not what mercy means. Nothing on this page asks anybody to stay in reach of somebody who is hurting them. Staying is not the merciful choice when staying is dangerous. Tell a doctor, tell a pastor, tell a friend, call the people whose actual job it is to help, and do it today. Getting yourself out of harm is not a failure of love, and it never was one.

For everybody else, whose house is hard and not dangerous, here is the shape of the thing.

You are holding today's portion, and today's portion is all that was ever issued to anybody. You do not have to take that from me. His word puts it in the prayer itself, give us this day our daily bread, one day at a time and never two weeks in advance, and the Spirit is what makes a single morning turn out to be enough.

That is why the arithmetic hurts so much. Four hundred days is not a load anybody was given. Nobody has ever been handed four hundred days. What you were handed is a Tuesday, and the Tuesday is genuinely doable, and the crushing weight you woke up with is the weight of a number that God never issued.

You have been faithful in a way that nobody has ever clapped for, and that is the kind He actually watches. No encouragement of mine could carry that. Scripture does, and His Spirit does, because Matthew 6:6 says the Father sees what is done in the room with the door shut and nobody watching.

There is no audience for the blue rubber band. There is no audience for the lotion on the heel. And that is exactly the category of thing Jesus went out of His way to say God is looking at.

You are being carried through a day that looks identical to four hundred others, and the carrying is going on whether you can feel it or not. It is written down, in Isaiah 40:31, that those who wait on the Lord exchange their strength for His, and the same Spirit who put the word wait in that sentence is at work in a kitchen at six thirty in the morning.