Flat Water, Six Years

Kimo had imagined that first morning so many times that when it finally came it felt like something he was remembering rather than something happening.

Six years. Six years of a shed with a light in it after everybody else in the house had gone to bed. Six years of shaping and sanding and starting a piece over because it was a quarter inch out and he was the only one who would ever know. His daughter had learned to walk past that shed door without knocking. His wife had stopped asking when.

The launch was on a Saturday. His brother came, and two of the men from work, and it went in clean, and nobody made a speech, which was right.

And on the Sunday morning he went out on his own, because that was the part he had been keeping.

He was on the water before six. There was no wind at all. The whole channel was flat and pale and the light came up the way it does maybe eight mornings a year, and the boat sat under him exactly the way six years of a shed light said it would.

He cut the motor. He let it drift. And he waited.

That is the part nobody prepares a man for. He actually waited, the way you wait for a set to come through, and after a while he understood he was doing it, and felt slightly foolish about it, and drank some coffee out of a flask.

It was not sadness. Sadness would have been something to work with. It was flatness, the same flatness as the water, and he had built a very good boat and rowed out into the middle of a morning that owed him a feeling and did not have one.

What got him was a memory of his grandfather's hands, which is not a thing he thinks about often.

His grandfather could not build anything. He was famous in the family for it. What he did instead was sit on an upturned crate at the end of the jetty every evening for about forty years, and whoever came down that jetty ended up sitting next to him, and he would say, without looking over, come sit. Tell me the day.

That was the whole of it. Come sit. Tell me the day.

Kimo sat in the middle of a flat channel in a boat he had spent six years on, and found that his face had gone, and he could not have said why to anybody who asked.

He started the motor. He came in early. And the sentence that arrived, somewhere past the point, had nothing to do with the boat.

He thought: I built something to go out in, and what I actually wanted was somebody to sit with.

Let me say the word plainly first

Before we go on I want to say plainly what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a total, not a finished thing on a trailer. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of a person because they belong at that table, and Scripture picks up that ordinary word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping handed to the people who missed out on the real thing.

Let me be as plain in the other direction. Money is not wicked, building something good is not a sin, and wanting a season of your life to finally pay off is not unspiritual. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give. That wire is not run here and it will not be. If you are truly short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your gut that goes with it, that is a real thing that deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a rebuke for wanting the load lighter.

What I want to do is narrower than that. I want to name the thirst you had on flat water, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Thirst, named without shame

David writes one line from a dry place, and he writes it without one gram of apology, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to thirsty people ever since.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.Psalm 63:1

Look at what the line does not do. It does not scold the thirst. It does not suggest a better man would have needed less. It takes the driest, most physical word available and puts it in the mouth of somebody who is not ashamed of it, and then it aims that thirst at a Person rather than at a supply.

You are not a man who cannot enjoy what he made. You are a thirsty person, and the written word treats thirst as the most reasonable thing about a human being. I am not putting my own idea over you here. That is what Scripture says about it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written in a wilderness and lands it in a boat on a flat morning.

And notice where the psalm goes with it, because this is the part that separates the two kinds of wealth. It does not say give me water. It says you are my God. The thirst is answered by a Presence, which is why nothing you could ever build was going to be able to answer it, and why the failure of the boat to answer it is no reflection on the boat.

What the shed light could not do

Think about what actually got you on the water. It wasn't the hull. The hull is good. Six years of a quarter inch at a time is in that hull and it will still be good long after that morning is forgotten.

It was the crate at the end of the jetty. It was an old man not looking over and saying come sit, tell me the day. You were thirsty to be sat with, and you still are, and there is no version of that hunger that is childish or small.

And you have a portion already, on that water, this morning, before anything changes about the boat or the seasons or the shed. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending and not waiting on a better feeling, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a boat rather than a phrase in a book.

Here is what the word settles about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you out there. You were never six years short of being worth sitting with. God did not stand at the far end of those six years with His arms folded to see whether you would finish. Jesus sat down in boats, in fishing boats belonging to working men, and slept in one, and taught out of one, and He was in yours before the sun came up.