I Cannot Hurry the Tide

Twelve forty in the afternoon in late August, and the creek is nothing but mud.

He got here at eleven fifteen with the skiff on the trailer and a cooler and every intention of running up to the far bend by one. The aluminum hull is over on its side now on the flat, propped at an angle that looks wrong, sitting on black mud and broken oyster shell with about four inches of brown water going nowhere in the middle of the channel.

The tide comes back at ten of four. He knows that. The chart is in the truck on the dash, and it has been right every single day of his life.

The heat is the kind that stands still. Marsh grass, not one blade of it moving. Cicadas going in the pines behind the landing, stopping all together for no reason, starting again. A gnat cloud that finds his ear and stays with it. The mud smells like sulfur and warm shell.

He has looked at his watch nine times.

That is the thing he cannot stop doing, and he is aware of it, and it makes it worse. Nine times in eighty five minutes. Each time the number is exactly where the arithmetic says it should be, and each time some part of him checks anyway, as though the moon might have reconsidered.

He set a folding chair up in the shade of the truck about an hour ago and has sat in it maybe six minutes total.

There is another number he is carrying and it is not on any chart. He turns fifty in March. He has said out loud, once, to his wife, in the car, that he wants to be a different man by then. She said something kind. He has not brought it up again, but it did not go anywhere, and it sits behind everything now like the tide chart on the dash.

He can hear how it sounds. That is the worst part. He is a grown man who has read enough and prayed enough to know that God is not running a calendar year, and he is still, at twelve forty, standing on a mudflat doing arithmetic on his own soul.

The gnats. The cicadas stopping again. Four inches of brown water.

Somewhere in your own week there is a date you are carrying that you have never written down, and it has a number in it, and you would rather not say it out loud to anybody either.

A tide chart is accurate and it is not an instruction

Let me name the date instead of pretending there is not one.

March. Or the anniversary. Or the birthday with the round number on it. Or the Christmas that got quietly picked as the deadline for a different man. Wanting that is not vanity and it is not unbelief, and I am not going to make you feel foolish for having said it out loud in the car.

Here is the trouble with the chart, though, and it is worth sitting with in the heat. The tide chart is accurate. It is one of the most reliable documents a man owns. And it is a description, not a lever. Knowing that the water comes at ten of four has never once brought the water in at half past two. A chart tells you what is going to happen. It gives a man no leverage at all on when.

You are not being asked to produce the water and you were never handed the moon. It is written all through the Psalms that the times are in God's hand rather than in a man's calculation, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief instead of a doctrine while a man sits on a mudflat in August.

And here is the harder half. Your own change does not even have a chart. There is no printed sheet on your dash that says when the thing you are asking for arrives. So the schedule you have been running is not just unenforceable. It was never issued.

He maketh me to lie down

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.Psalm 23:2

Look at who is doing the verbs in that line. He makes. He leads. The sheep is the object of both of them, from the first word to the last.

And the first thing He does with a sheep is not move it faster. It is put it down. A shepherd who knows his animals knows a sheep will keep grazing past the point of usefulness, so lying down has to be made to happen, and it is made to happen in a place with grass in it and water that is not moving fast.

You have a Shepherd who sets the pace and has never once handed the pace back to the sheep. That is written into both verbs of Psalm 23:2, and His Spirit is what turns an old shepherd's line into something a man can actually rest on with his watch in his pocket and the water still out.

Notice the water in that verse too. Still waters. Not slack water, not a race, not a bore coming up a creek. The picture the psalm chose for a soul being restored is water that is not in a hurry.

I am not going to turn that into a practice. The moment stillness becomes a discipline to be performed correctly, the psalm has been converted into one more thing to be behind on, and there is already a chart for that.

You have been led this whole way and the leading did not start when you started noticing it. Psalm 23 is written by a man looking back over green pasture and dark valley both and finding the same Shepherd in each, and His Spirit has been doing that leading through years you would have described as standing still.

What the date is doing to you

Now the plain part, and I want it to sit in the middle of this rather than at the bottom.

A date carried long enough starts pressing. If the weight of the man you meant to be by March has turned genuinely heavy, or if most days now are about holding on rather than getting anywhere, put a human being into the boat with you. A doctor first, because a body worn through produces a man who cannot feel any progress at all, and that is a medical fact with a medical answer. A counselor, because nobody reads their own chart accurately from inside the heat. A pastor holding the unedited account. None of it substitutes for God working; it is very often the way the work arrives. And if the hours out here have started drifting toward the idea that the house would be simpler with you gone from it, call 988 today, or a crisis line closer to home, and put one person on the flat beside you.

You are carried in this and you were carried through every August you have already been through. Isaiah 46:4 is written as a promise from God to carry His people, in His own voice, with no conditions hung on it, and the Spirit that Scripture calls the Helper is the one who makes that an actual set of arms rather than a nice line.