The Tide Kept No Ledger

My uncle used to say that the ocean does not remember what you did last summer, and he meant it as a joke about somebody's boat, but I have thought about it for years since.

Picture the shoreline at four in the morning. Nothing moving but the water. The line of wet sand where the tide got to overnight, and above it the dry sand, and the sand does not care which one it is. There is a canoe pulled up past the high mark and it has been there a while, long enough that the wind has put a little sand along one side of it.

There is a man who comes down to that beach and does not go out.

He comes early. He checks the hull he does not need to check. He coils the line that is already coiled. Then he sits on the log above the tide line and watches the light come up over the water, and at about six he goes home.

He has been doing this for two and a half years, and if you asked him why he does not put the canoe in, he would tell you something about the season or the swell, and both of those would be true and neither of them would be the reason.

The reason is that he believes he has an amount to work off first.

Not to anybody in particular. He could not hand you an invoice. But he is carrying a picture of a set of scales, and on one side is a stretch of his life he is not proud of, and on the other side is a quantity of something he has not been able to name, and he understands, in the way a man understands things he has never said aloud, that until the second side comes up level he does not have the standing to push out into deep water and pray.

So he sits on the log. Faithfully. At four in the morning. For two and a half years. Which is, if you look at it from the outside, a man doing an enormous amount of religious work while believing he has not started.

And the tide comes in and goes out and takes no notice, and keeps no record of the summer he is thinking about, and does not require anything of him at all before it lifts a hull.

That is you, on the log above the tide line.

You've been paying down a figure that nobody issued. You could not name the currency if I asked you. And the years of sitting there have become, in your own mind, the down payment, which means the sitting has to continue, because the moment you stop sitting you would have to face the fact that the account was never real.

The drawing came first, and the drawing is the whole verse

I want to name the wound before I say anything about the lift, because a lift that arrives before the wound is named is not worth much.

The wound is this: somewhere you learned, probably without words, that love is a balance and you're behind on it. Not by anyone cruel, necessarily. By a hundred small arrangements. And once a person carries that, every relationship becomes an account, and the biggest account of all becomes God.

Now hear Jeremiah, and hear the order the sentence puts things in.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Loved. Then drawn. That is the whole architecture, and there is no third clause where anybody works.

You have been loved with a love that does not have a start date, and that is why you are on that beach at four in the morning at all. I am not putting that over you as a kindness: Jeremiah 31:3 says everlasting, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than these words who can walk it under a set of scales you have carried since childhood.

Look at the word therefore, because it is doing something enormous. Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. The drawing is the consequence of the loving. It is not the reward for the returning. The pull you have felt at four in the morning for two and a half years, the thing you have been interpreting as guilt, as unfinished business, as the account calling: that is the drawing. It was never the bill. It was the rope.

You have been drawn, not summoned, and there is no ledger at the other end of that rope, which is written into the verse rather than into my hope for you, with the Spirit of God able to make that land in a body that has spent thirty months braced for the reckoning.

And notice, in the Hebrew, what kind of drawing it is. It is the word you would use for drawing water up out of a well, or for pulling something toward you gently and steadily. Not hauling. Not dragging. The pace is the pace of somebody who is not in a hurry and is not going to let go.

Which means the two and a half years of sitting on that log were not wasted, and they were also not payments. They were a man being drawn, slowly, by Somebody with time.

This is yours right now, this morning, before the canoe goes in and before anything is settled. Jeremiah 31:3 holds it up, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it something you can stand on rather than something you find beautiful.

The land, the water and the light coming up over it are all His handiwork and none of them are keeping your account. Neither is He.