What Holds The Boat While You Work

In March the yard fills up. Boats come out of the water and go up onto their cradles in rows, and for about six weeks the whole place smells of dust and antifoul and cut wood, and there are people underneath everything with scrapers and rollers and radios on low.

He is under the same hull he has been under every spring for thirty-one years. It was his father's boat and it is a small one and it is nothing special. He does the same jobs in the same order because that is how you do not forget one. Scrape, wash, two coats. Check the seacocks. And then the tiller, which he takes home every year and does properly at the kitchen table over two evenings, because the tiller is the part your hand is on, and a hand knows.

This spring somebody else's boat did not come out. An older man in the far row sold up in February, quietly, and the space where his cradle stood has grass coming through it now. Nobody made a fuss. Everyone noticed.

And under his own hull, with a scraper in his hand and his knuckles cold, this man thinks the thought that has been circling him since Christmas, and it is not a dramatic thought and there is nothing wrong with him. It is this. I do not need a great year. I have had good years. I need to still be here in twenty of them.

Maybe you know exactly what that feels like. It is not a crisis and you have not walked away from anything. You are twenty years in, or thirty, and everything is more or less as it should be, and what you want is not a mountaintop. What you want is to still be here, still doing this, still knowing Him, when you are old. And there is a small quiet worry that comes with wanting that, which nobody talks about at church, because it sounds like doubt and it is not doubt. It is just the length of the road.

The cradle nobody ever looks at

He knocked his knuckle against the cradle timber that afternoon, the way a man does when he is thinking. And it landed on him for the first time in thirty-one springs.

He was not holding the boat up.

He has been down there under it every March of his adult life, working on the hull as though the hull's condition were the whole question, and the entire time there has been a set of timbers and chocks and wedges under the keel bearing every last kilogram of it. Not once has he checked them. Not once has he worried about them. They were simply the ground of the yard, so completely reliable that they had gone invisible.

That is the shape of the thing, and Jude puts it in one sentence at the end of his short, blunt letter, after a whole page of hard warnings, as if to say: now let me tell you who is actually doing this.

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy.Jude 24

Read who the verbs belong to. He is able to keep. He presents. And the joy at the end of it is not manufactured by the one arriving; it is already there in the room, because it was His idea in the first place.

So let this be said over you plainly, and let it be Scripture saying it rather than me. You are being kept. Not kept if you manage to hold your concentration for another two decades, and not kept in proportion to how your prayer life is going this month. Kept, present tense, by someone whose ability is the thing the verse is actually about, and His Spirit is the one who takes an old benediction like that and lets a man feel the timbers under him on a cold afternoon.

Now, here is what I am not saying, because a certain kind of comfort ruins people. I am not telling you the scraper does not matter. It matters. Paul was perfectly happy to say in the same breath that God is the one who began a good work and will carry it through, and that we work out what He is working in. Two hands on one job, and never in competition, and Philippians 1:6 puts the carrying on His side while His Spirit does the working in. You keep what you were given. He keeps you.

And the guarding He asks of you is smaller than you think, which is the part almost nobody believes. It is not a regime. Yours is probably one thing, and you already know what it is. The ten minutes that used to happen and does not any more. The person you used to ring. The tiller you take home in the winter. Something ordinary and specific and unimpressive, and you noticed it slipping some time last year, and I want to say clearly that noticing it is not an accusation. Noticing is a kindness. It is one of the gentlest things the Holy Spirit does, and He does it early, on purpose, when the thing is still small.

You have not wasted anything. Nothing in the word puts your thirty years on a scale against your last six months, and I am not going to be the one who does it either, and it is His Spirit rather than my kindness that settles that in a man scraping a hull.

So what do you do with a thought that circles you at Christmas and a road you cannot see the end of?

You speak. You say the true thing out loud, into the actual air of the actual yard, because that is the appointed way and it always has been. Jesus put the measure of faith it takes so low that the men listening argued with Him about it, and His point was never the quantity in your hand; it was that the mountain gets spoken to (Matthew 17:20). Twenty years you cannot see is a mountain. It has been sitting in the back of your mind for months without ever once being addressed out loud.

And you have the standing to address it, because Jude 24 says He is able to keep you from stumbling. Not because of the thirty-one springs, good as they were, but because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and every word of authority you speak is His and not your record's. His Spirit is what carries a spoken thing out of a man's mouth and makes it land somewhere real.