The Second Set Of Footprints

Six miles, and she has walked them nearly every Sunday for eleven years.

Out along the top, down the steps at the point, back along the shingle if the tide allows and along the road if it does not. She knows where the ground is bad after rain. She knows which gate you have to lift.

It is not a spiritual practice. She would laugh at you for calling it that. It is a walk. But it is also the place where she does most of her honest thinking, and there is a stretch above the second cove where she has prayed about nearly everything that has ever happened to her.

A few Sundays ago she was on that stretch, and the thought arrived out of nowhere the way they do.

If I stopped coming, nobody would know.

Not nobody in a tragic sense. She has people. She has a brother she rings, and a good friend from work, and a whole row of faces at church who would say hello.

It is just that nobody in the world knows about the Sunday walk. Nobody knows about the stretch above the second cove. And so if she stayed in bed every Sunday from now until Christmas, there is no one who would notice a gap, because there is no one who knows there is a thing there to have a gap in.

She stood at the top of the steps and looked at that and thought: well. That is a strange thing to find out about your own life on a nice afternoon.

If you have found something like that out lately, come and sit on this bench a minute. Nobody is going to sign you up to anything.

Two is not the emergency arrangement

There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that gets read at weddings, which is a shame, because it was not written about romance at all. It was written by a man looking hard at how a person actually survives a life.

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up.Ecclesiastes 4:9 and 10

Look at the order of that. He does not say two are better in a crisis. He says two are better for the toil, which is the ordinary work of ordinary days, and then he mentions falling almost as an afterthought.

The togetherness is not the ambulance. The togetherness is the arrangement, and the ambulance is one of the things it happens to be good for.

That matters enormously for you, because you are not in trouble. You have nothing to report. And if you believe that being known is something you do when you are struggling, then having nothing to struggle with becomes a reason to stay unknown, and that is exactly the shape you have quietly arrived at.

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 toil before any falling is mentioned, and it is the Holy Spirit who arranges those people, which means wanting one is not a deficiency to be grown out of.

Being known is not the same as being reported on

Now let me take the other fear off the table, because I suspect it is the real one.

You are not being asked for an accountability arrangement. Nobody is proposing a group, a contract, a check in, a person who asks you every fortnight whether you have done the things. This site does not hand anybody a system, and I am not about to start.

What is on offer is smaller and far harder: one person knowing one true thing.

Not your whole interior. Not a confession. One true sentence, of the sort that takes four seconds and costs something.

I walk the coast path on Sundays and it is where I pray.

That is it. That is the entire ask. And notice what it does. It does not make anybody responsible for you. It simply means that a thing which existed only inside you now exists between two people, and the moment it does, there is a person in the world who could notice.

You have permission to be known in the ordinary, and you are not weak for wanting it. Galatians 6:2 says to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and it is the Spirit who binds people together in the first place, so a friend who knows one true thing about your Sunday is not a crutch, it is the arrangement working. God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you, and the company He provides sits inside that keeping.

And if you are reading this and you genuinely have nobody, I am not going to talk over you. That is a real thing and it is not your fault and it is not a failure. Start with God, who already knows about the stretch above the second cove and has been there every week, and ask Him for one person. You are already known completely, and you are already kept, and that is true tonight whether or not anybody else has been told. Psalm 139:3 says He is acquainted with all your ways, and it is His Spirit who has been on that path with you, so nobody knowing is not the same as nobody watching.