One Tear in Eleven Weeks

The rain came in at seven and it has not been hard once, and it has not stopped either.

He is on the dock apron under the tin roof, where the water comes off the edge in a line and lands in the same puddle it has been landing in since March. Ten in the morning. The kind of gray that has no weather in it, just a lid. Everything smells like wet rope and the low tide under the planks.

The net is spread out in front of him the way it has been most evenings since June. Green twine, mended sections showing lighter where he has worked. A wooden needle. A plastic crate turned over for a seat, and another one holding the coil.

Eleven weeks he has been working across this net, corner to corner, one section a night, going slow and doing it properly instead of doing it fast. There were evenings he sat down out here when he did not feel like it at all. There were four or five nights it was the only thing that got him through the hours between eight and eleven.

Last night he put a tear in it four feet long.

Not by accident. That is the part he keeps arriving back at. He knows exactly how it happened, and it took about twenty minutes from the moment he decided to the moment it was done, and it went straight through the middle of the section he had finished on Tuesday.

He is looking at it now with the needle in his hand and he has not made a stitch in forty minutes.

The tear runs right through the good work. That is what he cannot get past. If it had opened somewhere he had not reached yet, that would be a job. This went through the part he had already mended, and it makes the eleven weeks look like a story he told himself.

Somebody comes down the ramp behind him in a rain jacket, says something about the tide, and keeps going. He answers without turning around.

Eleven weeks. He had counted them. He had, on Sunday, in the truck, actually thanked God for them out loud, and felt something like hope, and it had been a long time.

The water comes off the tin roof in the same line into the same puddle.

Here is the sentence sitting in his chest and he would not say it to anybody: what is the point of eleven weeks if one Thursday can put a four foot tear through all of them.

There is a net in your own week and it is probably not made of twine. And there is a Thursday behind you, close enough that you are still not looking straight at it.

The tear is four feet long and I am not going to call it a snag

I want to do the hardest thing first, because everything else depends on it.

The tear is real. It went where you know it went. It cost something and it is going to cost something to repair, and there was a decision in it that took twenty minutes and it was made with the lights on. I am not here to shrink that down into a stumble or a wobble or a bad week. Shrinking it would be the most disrespectful thing I could do to you, because a man who has just told the truth about himself does not need talking back out of it.

And it does not go the other way either. Nobody is going to hand you a permission slip out of this and call it grace. Grace has never once meant that the tear does not matter. It means the tear is not the last word, which is an entirely different sentence.

You are held by somebody who does not flinch at what happened Thursday and does not pretend it did not happen. Isaiah 42:3 is written about exactly this kind of person, the reed already bent and the wick already smoking, and the Holy Spirit is what carries an old prophecy off the page and onto a dock apron in the rain.

Both halves at once. That is the whole ministry here. Honest about the tear, and not one inch back toward the beginning.

Eleven weeks did not come out of the net when the net tore

Now go and look at the net instead of at the tear, which is the one thing a man in your position never does.

The tear is four feet. The net is enormous. Every section you mended in June is still mended. The corner you did the first week, working slowly, getting it wrong twice, is still holding. The night in July you sat down out here with nothing left in you and worked anyway is in that net. None of that came undone last night. The tear did not travel.

That is not a nice way of looking at it. That is a fact about netting.

You have eleven weeks of real work still in your hands and one night did not lift it out. It is written that He who began a good work is the one who carries it to completion, which puts the continuity of this in His hands rather than in your Thursday, and it is His Spirit doing the carrying whether or not a man on a crate can feel it.

I know what the counting does. The counter goes back to one and it feels like everything went back to one with it, and the arithmetic of a counter is not the arithmetic of a person. A counter measures a run of days. It has never been able to measure what eleven weeks of doing a thing properly did in a man, and it never will be, and that is a limitation of counters and not a report on you.

And this is where writing like this usually starts grading, so let me refuse it out loud. Nobody here is scoring your eleven weeks and there is no schedule on this site. Thursday is not evidence about your sincerity and it is not a report on how much you wanted it.

You are the same man God was at work on last Wednesday, and Thursday did not change who He is at work on. It is written that He remains faithful when we are faithless because He cannot deny Himself, and His Spirit is what holds that steady over a dock apron at ten in the morning.

He does not break the bent one

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

Read what the reed is doing in that verse. It is already bent. It is not a promising reed. It is not upright and it is not going to photograph well, and the prophecy is that He will not finish the job that the wind started.

And the flax is the wick of a lamp that has gone to smoke. Anybody sensible pinches out a smoking wick. He does not.

You are the bent one in the verse and that is not the insult it sounds like. That is written as the description of the people He specifically does not discard, and the same Spirit who inspired the line is the one holding the reed steady while a man kneels on wet planks with a needle in his hand.

Now the plain paragraph, and it is not a footnote. If what you went back to on Thursday is hurting you, or hurting somebody who lives in your house, get another person into it with you. A doctor, because a great many patterns have a body underneath them and bodies can be treated. A counselor, because a man on a crate cannot see his own net from where he is sitting. A pastor who has the whole account and not the dock version. Not one of those is a smaller road than prayer. Most of the time it is the answer walking down the ramp in a rain jacket. And if the nights have run somewhere past regret, if the weighing has started over whether this dock would be quieter with nobody on it, call 988 before the tide turns, or whichever crisis line covers this stretch of coast, and get one person near enough to kneel down on the planks beside you.