The Stones They Set In The River

The river at that crossing is shallow enough in summer that you can walk it, and there are stones in the bed of it that are not where the river put them.

Somebody set them. A long time ago, judging by how deep they have sunk. Twelve of them, more or less in a line, and if you know they are there you can get across without going in above your knees.

He has known about those stones since he was a boy. His grandfather showed him. And a few weeks ago he took his own grandchildren down there and showed them, and stood in the shallows in his rolled up trousers while they shrieked and slipped about, and had a thought that he has not been able to put down since.

He is fifty five.

He is not in trouble. Nothing is wrong. He has a good marriage, work he does not hate, a body that mostly cooperates. It is only that somewhere in the last few years his hopes for his own life quietly got smaller, and he never noticed them going.

He does not expect anything remarkable now. He is not waiting for a season. If you asked him what he wants, he would think about it for a while and then say something like: I just want to get to the end of it without turning into somebody they have to make excuses for.

That is a smaller prayer than he used to pray. He knows it is. And he cannot tell whether it is wisdom or whether something has gone out of him.

If you have caught yourself praying that one, come and sit on the shingle. Nothing here is going to be a warning.

The finishing line is not a solo achievement

Paul writes a sentence near the end of his life that everybody quotes and hardly anybody reads carefully.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.2 Timothy 4:7

Three verbs, all his, all in the past. It looks like a man's own account of his own achievement, and if you stop there you will hear it as a bar you have to clear.

But read what he says two sentences later. He says the Lord will stand by him and strengthen him, and he says it about a man who has already finished. And read what he wrote earlier in the same letter, in chapter one, where the whole thing rests: I know whom I have trusted, and I am persuaded that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day.

Able to guard. Him, not Paul. And the phrase until that day is doing enormous work, because it means the keeping runs the whole distance, including the part Paul had not walked yet when he wrote it.

You are being kept to the end, and the arriving was never listed among your responsibilities. 2 Timothy 1:12 puts the guarding in God's hands until that day, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the guarantee of the inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, so the finish you are quietly worried about is being held by somebody who does not get tired.

A smaller prayer is not a failure of nerve

Now let me deal with the thing you have been half accusing yourself of on that riverbank.

You think your hope shrank because something went out of you. I want to offer you a different reading, and then I want to add something back.

A man of fifty five who wants above all to arrive intact is not a man whose faith has cooled. He is a man who has watched enough life to know what is actually difficult. Wanting to still be recognisably yourself at the end is not a small ambition. It is very nearly the whole of the New Testament's ambition for anybody.

So nobody is telling you that your prayer has got too modest. You have not lost your nerve, and what you are asking for is exactly what God is already doing. Jude 24 says He is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless with great joy, and it is His Spirit who does the presenting, which means your smaller prayer and His stated intention turned out to be the same sentence.

But here is what I want to add, standing in that water with the children slipping about.

Somebody set those stones. They did not do it for themselves. Whoever put twelve flat stones in a riverbed had already crossed and was never going to need them again, and they did it anyway, and a man is standing in the shallows two lifetimes later with his trousers rolled up because of it.

That is what the long haul is for. Not just arriving. Arriving having put something in the water.

You have something to hand forward, and you are holding it right now, as you read. Psalm 145:4 says one generation commends His works to another and declares His mighty acts, and it is the Spirit of God who carries that across a gap of years, so the crossing you know how to make is not merely your own survival, it is a thing you are able to leave in the riverbed.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. You are not holding the far bank up with your own two arms.