The Tide Took Everything But This

Four fifteen in the afternoon in November, and the tide is as far out as it goes.

He comes down the county stairs the way he has come down them for thirty years, except these are not the stairs. The originals went in a storm in the nineties. The county built them again and the sea took those too, and this third set is concrete and set further back, and he still calls them the county stairs out of habit.

The beach at dead low is enormous. Half a mile of hard ribbed sand going out gray and silver, wind coming straight down it off the point, cold enough that his hands go in his sleeves. Driftwood up along the wrack line, a whole spruce trunk this year that came from somewhere north. One black piling standing out of the flat where the old jetty was, and the rest of that jetty is under him somewhere, and has been since before his daughter was born.

He knows this beach the way people know a face.

He can tell you what each winter took. The year the point moved forty feet. The year the barge wreck went under for good and the tourists stopped asking about it. The year all the sand dollars came in at once and the year after that when there were none. The dune grass has moved twice. The little cabin on the bluff is gone and there is a house there now with a lot of glass in it.

Everything here moves. That is what a beach is. Thirty years of walking it and he could draw you the whole slow migration of the place.

And there is one thing in him that has not moved an inch.

He is fifty eight. It was there when he was twenty eight and it was there when he was eighteen. He has been a Christian through the whole of it. He has prayed about it more times than he could count, in more postures than he could count. He has fasted over it. He has told one person, badly, in 2011, and then never brought it up again. He has read what there is to read. He has gone whole years believing it was finally under, and then a Tuesday comes and it is exactly where it was, at exactly the same depth, with the same shape it has always had.

The wind takes the sound of the gulls sideways. He puts his head down and walks the tideline north, the way he does.

Thirty winters have rearranged every single feature of this coast except that one.

There is something like this in you or you would not be standing here reading about a beach. It has its own weather and its own quiet, and it has outlasted more of your life than you would want to say out loud to anybody.

Everything on this coast has moved except the one thing

Let me start where you actually are instead of where an article would like you to be.

The thing has not moved. That is not a mood and it is not you being hard on yourself, it is a fact with thirty years of evidence behind it, and I am not going to open by talking a man out of his own data. A man who tells you that it has secretly been getting better is asking a man to distrust the only instrument he owns.

And I want to say the next part carefully, because the writing on this subject usually goes wrong here in one of two directions. It either treats a thing like yours as a curse handed down a family line, or it treats it as a spirit that some louder prayer would have evicted by now. Both of those move the whole conversation off God and onto a mechanism, and neither of them is what Scripture does with a man's depths.

You are not carrying a mystery that God has been waiting to be told about. Psalm 139 is written by a man taking inventory of exactly this and finding the ground already occupied, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that psalm from an old poem into something a man can stand on in the wind at four fifteen in the afternoon.

Made in the lowest parts of the earth, and seen there

My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.Psalm 139:15

Read where the making happened. Not on the surface. Not in the part of you people meet. In secret, in the lowest parts, in the dark, at a depth no one has ever gone down to including you.

And read the verb. Curiously wrought. That is careful work, close work, the kind a man does with his hands under a lamp. Whatever is down there, He was down there.

You have been seen the whole way down, at the exact depth of the thing, and the seeing did not begin this year. That is what the written psalm says about the lowest parts of a person, and His Spirit is the one who carries that from a page into the place in you that has never once been shown to anybody.

Which takes the shame out of it, and I want to be plain about what I mean, because shame and repentance are not the same animal. Repentance turns and faces God. Shame turns and faces itself and then hides, and hiding is the only thing in this whole situation that was ever actually optional.

Notice too what the psalm does not require. It does not require the man to name the thing to another human being before God will look at it. If telling somebody would help you, tell somebody. If it would not, or if it is not safe, or if you simply cannot, that is not a door locked against you. God is already at the depth. Nothing has to travel up first.

You have standing to bring this to Him without producing it for anybody else first. Hebrews 4:13 is written with all things naked and open before the eyes of the One we deal with, so the room where this gets handled already has both of you in it, and the Spirit is what makes that room an actual room instead of a figure of speech.

There was never a key to find

Here is the sentence I most want you to hear, and it took me years to be willing to say it out loud.

There is no key. There is no verse you failed to find, no prayer with the right words in it, no unconfessed hinge that would have swung the whole thing open in 2004 if only somebody had told you. That story gets told constantly and it is cruel, because it quietly turns thirty years of a man's honest wrestling into thirty years of a man being stupid.

You were never one technique away from this, and the years you spent looking for the technique are not wasted years. Scripture puts the searching of a man's deep places in God's hands rather than in his own, and it is the Spirit who searches the deep things, so the thing you could not reach was never the thing you were responsible for reaching.

And now the plain paragraph, because a walk on a beach is not treatment. If the immovable thing is wearing you down, or if it has begun landing on the people around you, get another human being into this with you. A doctor first, because a great many things that feel like the root of a man turn out to have a body underneath them, and bodies are treatable. A counselor, because there is work that only ever gets done in a room with another person in it and will never get done alone at low tide. A pastor who already has all of it. None of that is a lesser road than prayer; it is God working on this through hands that can actually reach you. And if the walk back toward the stairs has started including the wish that you would not make it, 988 answers tonight, on the phone or in a text thread, and a crisis line nearer the county stairs answers as well: use one, and have somebody with you before dark.