Small And Above The Water

The tide chart is taped inside the shed door, curled at the corners, and it says high water at seven forty one.

Mara carries the folding stool down over the shingle and sets it on the flat part where the grass gives out, and she sits with the binoculars in her lap. One lens has fogged on the inside since the winter and she has never got around to it, so she watches everything half clear and half milky and has stopped noticing.

She has been coming down for this tide for nine days.

When she was a girl there were twelve rocks. You could go out over them at low water like stepping stones, and every one of them had a name, most of them made up by her and her brother and one of them named after a dog. Twelve rocks, and you could stand out there on the furthest one and turn around and see the whole village at once, which at eight years old is the same feeling as owning it.

The water has been coming up all evening.

At half past six there were four rocks above the surface. At ten past seven there were two, the flat one and the one they called Bishop because of the shape. At half past seven the flat one went under, the way it goes, no drama, just gone between one look and the next.

Now it is twenty five to eight and there is one.

Mara sits with the fogged binoculars and watches the last one. It is not big. It never was big, it was just the one that stayed dry longest, and there was never a year in her childhood when anybody thought about it particularly. Now it is the only thing out there.

She has not said out loud to anybody what she is actually doing down here at this tide for nine days running. If she had to say it, it would come out sounding either dramatic or pathetic, and she cannot bear either, so it stays where it is.

What she is doing is finding out whether anything is left above the water at the top of the tide.

Twenty to eight. The rock is still there. The water is up against it and moving, and the top of it, maybe the width of a kitchen table, is dry.

Seven forty one comes. The gulls have gone quiet on the point behind her, the way they do when it turns.

Seven forty two. The water is not climbing anymore.

The rock did not get bigger. Nothing came back up. Twelve did not become twelve again, and she was not sitting there hoping it would, whatever anybody might assume about a woman with binoculars on a stool.

One rock. Above the water. At the top of the tide.

Mara puts the binoculars down on the shingle, and stands up off the stool, and stands there.

High water is the honest hour

Nobody is going to sell you the tide going back out.

That is the thing to get straight before anything else happens here, because half the comfort in the world is really just a promise about later, handed to a person who has to get through now. Nothing on this page tells you the twelve come back. Nothing here calls what is left a phase, a season, a valley on the way up, or a smaller version of something to be issued again once a person has recovered properly.

What is on the table is high water, and what is above it.

Because high water is the honest hour. At low tide everybody looks like they have plenty. Twelve rocks, names for all of them, room to walk about. It is at the top of the tide that a person finds out what was actually standing on the bottom, and the finding out is brutal and it is also the only information worth having.

So look at what is above the water, and hear this while you look at it. You are standing on something God set there, and Psalm 61 is where that is written down: lead me to the rock that is higher than I. The Holy Spirit put those words in the mouth of a man whose heart was overwhelmed, which means overwhelmed is not a disqualification, it is the address the verse was sent to.

"From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I."Psalm 61:2, KJV

Now read what the psalm does not ask for. It does not ask for more ground. It does not ask to be made bigger, restored, restocked or put back the way it was. It asks to be led to a rock that is higher than the man asking.

Higher than I. That is the whole hinge of the thing, and it moves the weight off you completely.

The question you have been sitting with for nine days is whether what is left is big enough. That was never the question. The question is whether it is higher than you, and the height of it is His, not yours, and it has not moved a single inch since the day you had twelve.

You have that already. It is not pending on how well you hold on tonight. His word calls Him the rock of my heart and my portion forever, and a written line turns into ground under a person's feet at twenty to eight in the evening because His Spirit puts it there.

And it is small. Say that plainly, because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of insult. What you have is smaller than what you had. Anybody who tells you that a small faith is secretly better has never watched eleven rocks go under and is not somebody you should take advice from.

Small is not the same as insufficient. Those two words got welded together somewhere and they should never have been.

A thing does not hold you because of its width. It holds you because of what it is fastened to, and this one goes all the way down to the floor of the sea and further, into bedrock nobody has ever seen and no weather has ever reached. You were put on that. Scripture says the foundation of God stands sure, and your feet did not find it by the strength of the grip you have managed to keep. His Spirit set them down on it.

So stop measuring the top of it. The top of it is the width of a kitchen table and that is not the number that decides anything.

This is yours, right now, at whatever hour your own high water comes in: something above the surface, put there and held there by God, with room on it for both of your feet. It is written that His grace is sufficient, which is a word about size and He chose it on purpose, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence to a man with a thorn is carrying it down a shingle beach to you.