What I Said in the Water

He tells the story badly on purpose. He makes it funny. He does the bit about the board going one way and him going the other, and everybody laughs, and then he moves on to something else, and that is how he has handled it for six years.

What actually happened is that the current took him past the point where he could see the beach properly, and he swam until swimming stopped being a thing his arms could do, and he went under twice, and the second time he was not sure he was coming up.

He came up. He got picked up by a set that pushed him in sideways and he crawled the last of it and lay on the wet sand coughing salt out of himself for a long time, and when he could talk he said it into the sand.

Every day of the rest of it is Yours. All of it. Every one.

He gave Him about eleven days.

Eleven good days: up before the light, out on the rocks with the book, the whole thing. And then he went back to work and it thinned, and by the end of that month the days had gone back to being his own, the way they had always been, and he did not decide that either.

Six years. He still surfs the same break. He still tells it funny. And what he has never said to anybody is that the thing that shook him was not nearly drowning. It was how quickly he took it all back.

You have your water. Maybe it was a road or a scan or a phone call at the wrong hour, and you gave Him everything out loud, and then you found out how little of everything you could hold, and the finding out has been quietly working on you ever since.

The wound is not the one he names

I want to name the wound properly, because it is not the broken promise. The broken promise is the top of it.

Underneath is something that has been eroding him for six years, and it is this: he found out what his own word is worth. He gave God everything, meant it in the most sincere hour of his life, and lasted eleven days. So now every time he goes to say anything to God he can hear the eleven days sitting there, and a man who cannot trust his own word stops giving it, and a man who stops giving his word stops talking.

Come to a psalm that goes to the bottom of exactly this. It is short and it is written by somebody in deep water.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.Psalm 130:3-4

You are not standing on your own reliability and you never were, and finding that out is the best day you have had in six years. Psalm 130:3 asks who shall stand and answers nobody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has held you up on every day you never gave Him.

Who shall stand

Read the question and then answer it honestly, because the psalm expects you to.

If God kept a mark, who is left standing? Not the person next to you. Not the one who kept their promise for eleven years instead of eleven days. Nobody. The question is rhetorical and its answer is zero, and the psalm is not being dramatic, it is being accurate.

Which means the eleven days did not make you a special case. It made you a person. You did not discover something uniquely rotten about yourself on that beach. You discovered what everyone is, and most people go their whole lives arranging things so they never have to find out.

You are not standing on your own reliability and you never were, and finding that out is the best day you have had in six years. That is what Psalm 130 is doing when it asks who shall stand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that from a general truth about people and makes it a specific relief in a specific man.

And then the turn. But there is forgiveness with thee. Not: but you should try harder. Not: but some people manage. There is forgiveness with You, and the reason given is the strangest and best reason in the psalm, that thou mayest be feared.

Forgiveness is what produces the reverence. Not the marking. If God kept the mark, He would get compliance and terror and eventually silence, because people who cannot pay stop coming. It is the forgiveness that brings a man back up the beach.

You have a God whose forgiveness is the very thing that makes Him worth revering, and He arranged it that way deliberately. That is written in Psalm 130:4, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been drawing you back toward that water for six years without once mentioning the eleven days.

The ocean did not know your promise

Here is a thing about the sea that I have known since I was small.

It does not respond to what you say. You can promise it anything. The water is not a party to any of it, and the day is not a party to any of it, and this is worth saying because a lot of people quietly think they made a deal with the universe on the sand and then defaulted.

You did not make a deal with the water. You said something to a Person, and that Person had already given His word about you before you went under, and His word was not conditional on the eleven days holding at twelve.

You are held by an oath that was sworn before you ever hit the sand. Scripture is full of God swearing by Himself because there was nobody greater to swear by, and His Spirit is the one who kept you breathing through all six years of the days you took back.

I am not going to walk you through what you did with those years, either. Not one of them. An inventory is a tribunal with the furniture moved, and there is no tribunal on this beach.