The Boat That Goes Out With Two

He goes out alone because it is simpler, and it has been simpler for about twenty years.

No waiting on anybody. No conversation before six in the morning. No having to explain why he wants to try the far side today when the near side is fine.

He is not a hermit. He is at everything. He knows everybody on that slipway by name and half of them by their fathers' names. He just does the actual going out on his own, and by now nobody thinks anything of it.

Last month there was one of those mornings where the water goes completely flat and the light comes up pink behind the point and you can hear somebody talking half a mile away.

He was sitting with the engine off, and the thought came in from nowhere, the way they do.

If I went over the side this morning, nobody would know which bay to look in.

Not a frightening thought exactly. He is careful, he has the gear, he has never had a bad moment out there. It was more the plain shape of it.

Nobody knows where he goes. Nobody knows he changed his mind about the far side. He has arranged a life, without ever deciding to, that nobody needs to know the shape of, and one morning on flat water he saw it laid out in front of him.

He did not tell anybody that either.

If you have looked at your own life and seen that, come and sit on the wall a minute. Nobody is going to sign you up to anything.

Three was never the emergency arrangement

There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that everybody has heard at a wedding, which is a shame, because the man writing it was looking hard at how a person actually survives an ordinary life.

Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.Ecclesiastes 4:12

Notice the order of the whole passage. He starts with toil, which is ordinary work on ordinary days. Then he mentions falling. Then cold. Then someone who might prevail against you. The togetherness is presented as the arrangement, and the emergencies come up as things the arrangement happens to be good for.

So being alongside somebody was never the thing you do when you are in trouble. That is the reading that has quietly shaped your last twenty years, because if company is for the struggling, then having nothing to struggle with becomes a reason to keep going out on your own.

You were made to be kept alongside somebody, and that is provision rather than weakness in you. Ecclesiastes 4 puts the second person into the ordinary work before any falling is mentioned, and it is the Holy Spirit who sets people beside people in the first place, which means wanting one is not a fault in a capable man.

One true sentence is not an accountability arrangement

Now let me take the real fear off the table, because I doubt very much that it is the water.

You are afraid of the fuss. You are afraid that if you say one true thing to somebody, you become a man other people manage. That the going out gets discussed. That there is now an arrangement where there used to be a boat and a morning.

Fair enough. So look at how small this actually is.

Nobody is proposing a group, a contract, a person who asks you questions every fortnight. This site does not hand anybody a system and I am not about to start.

One person. One true sentence.

I go out on my own most mornings and nobody knows where. I have never told anybody that the far side is where I go when I want to think. If something happened out there, you would be the one who knew where to look.

That is the entire ask. It makes nobody responsible for you. It simply means a thing which existed only inside you now exists between two people, and from that moment there is somebody in the world who could notice.

You have permission to be known, and you have not been reduced by it. Galatians 6:2 says to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and the one another is doing the work in that sentence, and it is the Spirit who binds any people together at all, so a man who lets one person know one thing has not stopped being capable.

And if you are reading this and you genuinely have nobody, I am not going to talk over you. That is real and it is not a failure. Start with the One who already knows which bay. You are already known completely, and you are already kept, and that is true this morning whether or not anybody has been told. Psalm 139:9 speaks of the far side of the sea and says even there His hand leads and holds, and it is His Spirit who has been in that boat with you every morning, so nobody knowing is not the same as nobody watching.

God is the one keeping you while you keep watch. He always was.