Long Grass Over The Hull

The grass has come up around it to about knee height, which is what happens in one summer if nobody walks there, and nobody has walked there.

It is a good hull. That is not pride, it is just true. Three quarters of the outside shaped, most of the inside still solid, and the line of it is right, and anybody who knows anything can see from twenty yards that whoever started this knew what they were doing.

Six of them worked on it. He remembers the day they turned it the first time and how much noise that took and how badly they did it and how funny it was. He remembers a boy called Junior who would not stop asking why, about everything, for four hours at a stretch.

Then the second summer arrived and Junior had a job in another town and one of the girls had a baby and two of them fell out with each other over something nobody now remembers, and there was a stretch of weather, and then it was just him with an adze and a Saturday, and a man on his own is a slow thing.

He stopped in the August. He did not decide to stop. He simply did not go down there one weekend and then the not going became the thing.

The sentence is not we never finished it. The sentence is: I got six young people interested and then I lost every one of them.

You have a version. It might be children who have gone their own way, or a team that scattered, or a thing you built with people who are not around any more. There is something half made in your life and you have quietly been reading it as a statement about your ability to hold anything together.

The performing was never yours

There is a line in a psalm written by a man hiding in a cave, and the tense of it does the whole job.

I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me.Psalm 57:2

That performeth. Present, continuous, and it is His verb. David is in a cave, hiding, with nothing of his life going according to any plan, and the name he reaches for is not the God who helps me perform. It is the God who performs, for me, while I am in here.

That is a very different account of a half carved canoe than the one you have been giving yourself.

You are inside the performing of a God who has been at work every single week of the two summers, including the ones where the only thing that happened out there was grass. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft reading I picked for a man with an adze in a shed, and the Holy Spirit who put six young people around that hull in the first place is the evidence that the gathering was never your doing either.

Watch what that does to the accounting. If the performing is His, then long grass around a hull is information about a job in another town, a baby, a fallout and some weather. It is not information about your ability to hold people, and it never had the standing to become that.

What was being made was not the canoe

Here is the second thing, and it takes the weight off completely.

Both summers have been measured by the object. Three quarters shaped, therefore three quarters of a success, therefore a man who gets three quarters of the way. But look at what was actually going on out there. A boy asking why for four hours. Six young people learning that an adult would keep turning up. A girl who is now a mother knowing the feel of a tool in her hand.

None of that is stored in the hull. All of it left with them.

You have been carried through both summers, and the carrying did not slow down when the last of them stopped coming. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in those six young people wherever they now are, rather than waiting in long grass for you to come back with a tool.

There is something worth saying plainly here, because this is exactly where this could turn into a shove and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to finish the canoe. Not this summer, not ever. If the grass takes it and it goes soft in ten years you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work was never a hull and it does not get measured in inches of shaped timber.

And this is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a good feeling in a shed. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not turned over quietly for two summers. And the thing in the way is not Junior, who was right to take the job, and it is not the two who fell out. It is a sentence: I lost every one of them. That has run without opposition because nobody has ever answered it out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with authority standing in knee high grass. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much you believed while saying them.

If those two summers have taken you somewhere darker than regret, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.