The Boat Stayed Tied Up

The light comes up the way it does out here, all at once along the top of the water and then slowly everywhere else, and Mack is sitting on the gunwale of a boat that has not moved.

There is dew on the middle thwart. There is sand worked deep into the seams the way it always is by this time of year. The painter line is in his right hand, looped twice, the way he has held it maybe four thousand mornings, and the other end of it is around the cleat and the cleat is around nothing going anywhere.

Down the beach a gull is arguing with another gull about something neither of them will remember.

The thermos lid is on the sand by his boot with about an inch of coffee in it, gone cold an hour ago.

Mack is the man who goes. That is not a thing he says about himself, it is a thing the whole shore would say about him without being asked. Engine quit out past the point at eleven at night, call Mack. Somebody's father needs to get to the mainland and the ferry is not running until Thursday, call Mack. The year the water came up over the road, Mack made nine trips and slept four hours and did not eat until Tuesday. He has pulled two families and a dog off a sandbar. He has stood in a kitchen at two in the morning while a woman cried about her son and he had absolutely nothing to say and he stayed until four anyway.

His phone is in his coat pocket. There are three messages on it. He has read all three and he knows what each one needs and he could tell you exactly how long each one would take.

And he is sitting on the gunwale of his own boat at first light with the line in his hand and he cannot make himself stand up.

It is not a decision. That is what is frightening about it. He has not decided anything. He has simply arrived at a morning where the thing that always worked has stopped working, like a starter motor that turns over and turns over and never catches, and he is sitting there listening to it not catch.

The tide is coming. In about forty minutes the water will be up around the keel and the boat will start to lift and knock a little, the way it does, and he will still be sitting here.

Somewhere behind him a screen door goes. The gulls quit. The light gets into the wet part of the sand and turns the whole strip of it the color of a coin.

You know this sand. Maybe you have never been in a boat in your life. But you are the one people call, and you have gone every time, and there is a morning happening in you right now where the going has run out, and the part that scares you is not the tiredness. The part that scares you is the quiet suspicion that if you are not the one who goes, you do not know what you are.

Nobody Comes Out For The One Who Comes Out

I want to say the plainest thing in this article first, and then spend the rest of it refusing to take it back.

You are the one being lifted this morning, and there is no shift change coming afterward. Psalm 40:2 has exactly one person doing the lifting and exactly one person coming up out of the mud, and the Spirit is not asking the man in the mud to hold the rope for anybody.

He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.Psalm 40:2

Read the verbs and notice who owns every one of them. He lifted. He set. He gave. The man in that verse contributes nothing at all except the mud he is standing in, and the psalm does not think less of him for it, and neither does anybody here.

You have run out, and running out is not a moral event. The Spirit has never once treated an empty man as a failed one, and it is written into Psalm 103:14 in words nobody needs help with: He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are dust.

Dust. Not steel. Not a resource. The word chosen for what you are made of is the one that blows away, and He is the one who chose it, and He said it as a reason for tenderness and not as an accusation.

And let me kill something right here before it gets any further into this page, because it gets into almost everything written on this subject. This is not rest so that you can go again. Nobody is topping up a tank as maintenance on a vehicle. If that boat never goes out for another soul as long as you live, the mercy on you this morning does not get quietly withdrawn in the fall, and no reckoning is ever brought against it. He is not that kind of Father, and Scripture has never once described Him as one.

You are being carried today by somebody who is keeping no tally of it at all. That is Scripture and not a kindness I made up, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it land somewhere other than your head.

He Lifts, He Sets, He Establishes

There is a particular exhaustion that belongs to the person who is always the one who goes, and it is not the same as being tired.

It is the exhaustion of never having been on the other end of it. Of being the chain and never the car. Thirty years of pulling and nobody ever pulls you, not because they are cruel, but because you are the one they call, and a man everybody calls is a man nobody checks on.

You have been given a rock to stand on and it was not issued on condition. You do not have to take that from me. His word says He set my feet on a rock and made my steps secure, and the Spirit is what carries a sentence like that off a page and onto wet sand at six in the morning.

You are being received today, and not repaired for service. No promise of mine could make that safe to believe. Scripture does, and His Spirit does, because in Matthew 11:28 Jesus tells the loaded down ones to come to Him, and the sentence ends on the word rest and not on an assignment.

Go and read what He does not add. There is no clause. There is no and then. The whole invitation terminates in rest, which means rest was the point of it and not the intermission in it.

You have been the one who goes, and this morning you are the one who is come for. It is written down, in Luke 15:4, that the shepherd leaves the ninety nine on the hillside and goes out after the one, and the same Spirit who moved that story is the reason nobody has to ring a bell for you today.

You do not have to get anybody's attention. That is worth sitting with for a second, because you have spent years being the one who notices, and the habit of noticing has quietly convinced you that noticing is a thing people have to do on purpose and mostly do not. He does not work that way. He came out over the hill for one sheep who was not shouting.