I Still Walk Down To The Water

The wall is wet and the light on the end of it still turns, although there is not much left in this harbor that needs telling where the entrance is.

He comes down at the same hour he used to be out past the point. His legs know it. There is nothing at home at that hour anyway, and the kettle can wait.

Three boats where there used to be more than he could count without starting again. Two of them laid up. The third belongs to a lad who does trips for holidaymakers in the season, and he is not unkind about that, but he does not look at it for long.

His phone is in his coat pocket and it pings when somebody in the town wants a fence panel put back up, or a wardrobe carried up two flights, or a garden cleared before a house goes on the market. He takes all of them. He is good at all of them. He is not proud about any of it and he does not intend to be.

He asked God for one specific thing. He asked plainly and he asked for a long time and it did not come. Nothing moved. The letter said what it said and the date on it stayed where it was.

He could not tell you when he stopped asking. There was no day. It went quiet in him the way the harbor went quiet, one boat at a time, and nobody stood up and announced it.

But he still walks down. Every day, at that hour, and if you asked him why he would look at the water and not answer you.

That is the thing worth looking at, and it is you as well, or this tab would already be shut.

Nobody here is going to explain it to you

I am not going to tell you why it was not answered. I do not know, and neither does anybody who has told you they do.

So let me say plainly what this page will not do, because you have had enough of the other thing. It will not tell you there was a reason. It will not tell you the timing was wrong, or that a better version of you would have got a different reply, or that there was a key in somebody else's hand that never made it into yours. It will not suggest that something you did closed a door, and it will not go looking through your life for the fault, because that search is what has been going on in your own head at that hour on that wall and it has never once turned up a defendant worth convicting.

Here is what I will say, and I am not saying it as my own kind opinion over a stranger. You are not disqualified. Scripture says that nothing in all creation is able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:39), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding you to that on the mornings when you had no feeling in you at all.

Not one word of that is conditional on getting the answer. Paul wrote it into a list that includes famine and nakedness and distress, which is to say he wrote it about people whose situations did not come right either.

The psalm that never turns

There is a song in the Bible that does not resolve. Most of them do. A man complains for eleven verses and then the light comes in at the end and he says but I will trust, and we all breathe out.

Psalm 88 does not do that. It goes down and it stays down, and the last line of it is about darkness being the only companion left.

You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.Psalm 88:18

Look at what happened to that psalm afterwards. Nobody edited it. Nobody appended a hopeful verse to make it usable. It went into the songbook of God's own people exactly as it was written, and it has been sung and read and prayed for thousands of years with the dark still in it, because the Holy Spirit who inspired that collection saw no reason to make it easier to sing.

You are holding a prayer that did not resolve, and the written word has a place on its shelf for exactly that, put there by the Holy Spirit who inspired the whole collection and left this one standing as it fell. Your unresolved thing is not evidence that you are outside. It is in the book.

And when the Son of God was on the cross He did not reach for a tidy psalm. He reached for the one that begins my God, my God, why have You forsaken me, and goes on to say I cry by day and You do not answer (Psalm 22:1 and 2). Nobody in the history of the church has read those words and concluded that the man saying them had been dropped.

What the walking down has been

Now look at what has actually been going on, because it has been happening under your own nose and nobody has named it for you.

You stopped expecting and you did not stop coming. That is not nothing. That is not a leftover habit either, whatever you tell yourself on the wall.

You are a man whose faith is still standing after the answer did not come, and that is a rarer and harder thing than a faith that was answered early. Scripture calls the keeping of it His work rather than yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who has walked you down to that water at the same hour, day after day, when there was no reason left on paper.

I am not going to turn that into a technique. There is nothing to do with it. It is simply true about you, and you are allowed to know it.