The Boat That Is Not Going Out

First light, and the tide is doing what it does whether or not anybody is out on it.

He walks down like he always walks down, because forty one years of walking down does not stop just because there is no reason to. The boat is up on the trailer with the cover on. There is a green stain along the waterline that he would have dealt with by now in any other year.

Two boats went out an hour ago. He heard them. He could tell you which two without looking.

The review came back in March and the license went with it. There were letters and a hearing and a man on a phone who was polite and used the word unfortunately six times, and the upshot is a season, at least a season, and nobody will tell him more than that.

His grandfather used to stand about where he is standing now and say a thing that got said in that family like a proverb, which was: look at that. That is how good God has been to us. Meaning the water. Meaning the whole shining stretch of it out to the point, and the living that came out of it, and the fact that the family was still here.

He looks at it now. It is the same water. It is doing exactly what it did last March.

And he cannot get the sentence out of his mouth. He has tried, actually tried, standing here, and it will not come, because the thing it was pointing at has been taken off him and the sentence and the sign came as a set.

If you were ever taught to read God's goodness off something you can see, and then the thing you could see was removed, you know this stretch of sand. Under it there is a question he has not asked anybody: if that was how good God had been to us, and it is gone, then what am I looking at now.

The sign was never the thing

Let me stand out here with you and say the hard part first, because you have been carrying it alone since March and it is heavier alone.

Your grandfather was not wrong. That water was good and it was from God and the family did eat off it for four generations. That is all true. But somewhere in the handing down, a sign got mistaken for the thing it was signposting, and you inherited the mistake along with the boat, and now the sign has been taken away and it feels like the thing has gone with it.

It has not. But you cannot be argued out of a feeling like that, so let me do something better and give you the word back as Scripture actually uses it.

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God: which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is.Psalm 146:5-6

Read where the psalm puts the blessing. Not on the sea. On the One who made it. And it says that in the same breath as mentioning the sea, deliberately, which means the psalm knows exactly how easy it is to look at water and think you have found the source.

And look at what is just before it. Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. The psalm is talking about depending on things that can be withdrawn. Then it says: happy, blessed, is the man whose help is the God of Jacob.

That is the word. Blessed is God's favor resting on a person, His face turned that way, His own self as their help. It is not a reading taken off the water. You have the God of Jacob as your help this morning, standing on this sand with the cover still on, and a review in March did not reach Him. Psalm 146 names Him as the help and names the sea as something He made, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to move a man's footing off a sign and onto the One the sign was pointing at.

Two words got the same spelling. Favored is one. Doing well off the water is the other. Your family had both for four generations and never had to tell them apart. You have to now, and that is the whole weight of this year.

The God of Jacob, and why that name

Now I want to stay on one phrase, because the psalm could have said the God of Abraham and it said the God of Jacob, and that is not decoration.

Jacob is the one who had things taken off him. He leaves home with nothing but a stick. He works fourteen years for a family and gets cheated over it. He comes back frightened, walks with a limp for the rest of his life after a night he never fully explains, loses the wife he loved, believes for years that he has lost a son.

If you were choosing a name for God that a man standing beside a boat he cannot use would recognize, you would choose that one.

You are being handed the name of God that belongs to a man who kept having things removed, and it was chosen on purpose. Psalm 146 says the God of Jacob and not another name, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient title land on a specific man on a specific morning as something meant for him.

And notice what the psalm goes on to list about this God: He keeps truth forever, executes judgment for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, looses the prisoners, opens the eyes of the blind, raises up them that are bowed down, relieves the fatherless and the widow. That is the whole list, and there is not one thing on it about a good season.

Every single item is about people who have had something removed.

You are on the list of people this psalm is actually about, and you have been reading it as though it were written for the ones out on the water. The written word points that whole passage at the bowed down and the stripped, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man count himself in rather than out.

What I am not going to say to you

I want to be straight, because a man who has been handled politely by six people since March can smell a soft sentence coming.

I am not going to tell you the license comes back. I do not know. Nobody who tells you they know is telling you the truth, and the guessing is what has worn a groove in you since the hearing.

I am also not going to tell you that losing it was secretly the good thing. It was not. It has cost you money and standing and the shape of your own mornings, and God is not the author of a review. That is the more comfortable ditch and I am not putting you in it.

Both halves. Your hard year is not the withdrawal of His favor, and it is not the favor wearing a disguise.

You are blessed and the boat is on the trailer, and both of those are true on this same stretch of sand. Scripture puts the blessing on whose help is the God of Jacob without saying a word about what the man has left, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it possible to hold both without one of them going quiet.

What is written is where the help is. That much I will stand on with you at first light.