Before the Boat Goes Out

He is on the water by four twenty. Has been for eleven years.

There is a reason he gives, and it is a good one, and it is even mostly true. The water is flat then. You beat the wind. You beat the other boats to the spot. His wife has heard the reason a thousand times and has never once questioned it, because it makes sense and because he is a man who goes to work.

Here is the actual reason. Between the harbor mouth and the first line, there is a stretch of about forty minutes where there is nobody on this earth who can reach him. No door opening. No phone. No brother pulling up in the yard. Forty minutes of nobody, and it is the only forty minutes he gets, and he would go out in weather he should not go out in to have them.

Because there is one thing he has never said out loud to a living person.

Not his wife, who has been in that house with him for twenty-six years and knows the sound of his boots. Not his brother, who works the same water and would drop everything. Not the pastor, who is a good man and has never pushed. Nobody has asked, because there is no reason anybody would.

And this is the part he has never once let himself hold in his hands: he has never said it to God either.

He prays out there. He is not a man far from God. He prays before he goes over the side of anything, and he prays for his son who is having a hard time, and he prays when the swell gets bigger than the forecast promised. He has just learned across eleven years to pray in a wide loop around one place, the way a man learns a channel and never has to think about it again.

You know that forty minutes. It might not be water. It might be a drive, or a run, or the hour before the house wakes up. One thing, never said to a person, never said to God, and by now the going out alone has stopped feeling like avoidance and started feeling like your life.

Cut the engine a minute. Nothing here is going to ask you what happened.

There is no water dark enough

I want to start with the thing that has been true out there the whole eleven years, and it is going to sound too simple to have taken this long.

He has never been alone on that boat. Not one morning.

If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to You; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with You.Psalm 139:11-12

The psalmist tries to find a place. He goes up, he goes down, he takes the wings of the morning and goes to the far side of the sea, which is exactly where a fisherman would go, and the whole poem arrives at one conclusion: there is no such place. You were accompanied every morning of those eleven years, and Psalm 139 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a poem that old and puts it in a man's chest at four twenty in the morning.

That is either the worst news a man ever heard or the best, and which one it is depends entirely on what you think of the One who has been in the boat. So let me tell you plainly what He is like: He has been out there every morning and He has never once said a word about it. Not a lecture. Not a hint. Eleven years of company and no pressure at all. You have been sitting beside patience that long, and Scripture calls Him slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and the Spirit who kept you company out there is the same Spirit reading this line with you now.

What the forty minutes was actually buying

Let me name the trade, because I think naming it takes the weight off.

Those forty minutes are not rest. A man who is resting does not need to be unreachable. What they buy is a stretch of time where he does not have to be the version of himself that everybody in that harbor and that house depends on, and does not have to be alone with anybody who might ask.

And underneath it sits one belief that has never been said out loud. That if the people who love him ever saw the thing, they would rearrange themselves around him. That his wife would love him carefully instead of easily. That his brother would be kind about it, which would be worse.

You were never one disclosure away from being a stranger to God, and Romans 8 says nothing in all creation can separate you from that love, and it is His Spirit and not your record who guarantees the sentence. He has known since before you had a boat. There has been nothing about you He learned late.

Nobody has to be told, and nothing has to be told

Now the practical part, and it is much smaller than eleven years have made it.

There is no requirement to tell a person. Not your wife, not your brother, not the pastor, not me. No verse anywhere puts that on a man, and I am not going to build one out of half a proverb to sound serious. Some things a man brings to God alone, and that is judgment, not cowardice.

And there is no requirement to describe it to God. He was there. He does not want the account read back. You have nothing left to establish, because 1 John 1:9 calls Him faithful and just about exactly this, and it is His Spirit who applies that and not the thoroughness of your report.

So it can be four words. It can be a place name and then nothing. Psalm 32 says the bones wore out under the silence and the weight came off when the silence broke, and that psalm never records one syllable of what the man actually said. The stopping is what got written down.