The Sentence For The Last Breath

There is a place on the sea wall where the wall turns, and a length of rail there has been bent since somebody put a car into it years ago, and nobody has ever come to straighten it.

He walks the dog past it at ten past six. He has done that walk for eleven years, and for the first seven of them it was a full hour of talking.

He had a list of names, twenty three of them, and he prayed the list in order all the way to the slipway. He had a psalm by heart. He had thanksgivings, which he did on the way back, one for every set of steps down to the shingle, and there are nine sets. He had a hymn from his childhood that he sang under his breath where the path goes behind the boat sheds, because there is nobody down there at that hour.

It did not stop all at once. He would not be able to tell you the date any part of it went.

The names went first. Not all of them. Two of those people stopped speaking to him over something he still does not fully understand, and one of them died in the spring, and after that the list would not stay in order in his head and he stopped trying to keep it there.

The psalm went next, over about a year, because he kept arriving at the last verse and finding that he could not get through it out loud, and a man who cannot finish a psalm eventually stops beginning it.

The hymn went last, and quietly, and he only noticed it was gone in November when he walked past the boat sheds and realized he had walked past them in silence for weeks.

So now there is one sentence.

He says it in the same place, level with the bent rail, every morning. It is short. He is not going to tell you what it is because he has never said it to another living person, and it costs him something even to say it into the wind with only a dog listening.

One morning in February it blew straight off the water at something like fifty, the sort of wind that flattens the grass on the bank and takes the top off the waves and throws it at you. He got to the turn and the dog would not go past it, and he had to set his feet apart and lean into it to stay upright at all.

And he said the sentence anyway. Half of it came straight back at him. His eyes were streaming from the cold.

He stood there for a moment afterward with his coat cracking like a sail and the light coming up gray and then gold over the water, and he noticed something he had not expected to notice, which was that he was still standing.

He is ashamed of the sentence. He thinks of it as the last of something rather than as anything in itself. He is a man who used to have an hour and now has nine words, and he has never told a soul, and he assumes that anybody who found out would be gentle with him in the particular way people are gentle with a thing that is finished.

One sentence, said from an ash heap

Job 19 is not a chapter of consolation. It is a man losing an argument in public.

Read what he says immediately before the famous line. His kinsfolk have failed. His familiar friends have forgotten him. The servants do not answer. His own household counts him a stranger. He is describing a life stripped down to nothing, and he is doing it in front of three men who keep explaining his suffering back to him as though he had asked.

And out of that, with no property, no children, no health, no reputation and no support in the room, he says one sentence.

For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:Job 19:25

That is the whole of it. Not a system. Not a defense. One line that has outlived every one of the elaborate speeches around it, and it was said by a man sitting in ashes who had nothing else in his hands at the time.

So take this exactly where you are, at the bent rail, with your nine words. You are standing on the same kind of ground Job stood on, and I am not deciding that on your behalf: Job 19:25 is written down and kept in the middle of a man's worst chapter, and His Spirit put it there rather than in a chapter where things were going well.

I am not going to take you to the end of the book. You are not at the end of the book, and using somebody else's last chapter as a promise about yours is a cruelty with a smile on it. What is in front of us is chapter 19, where nothing has been given back yet, and the sentence works there. That is the only place its strength can be tested and it is the place you are standing.

Here is the thing about a remainder that nobody says out loud. You have been treating it as evidence. The shortness of what is left has become, in your own private accounting, proof of a decline, and every morning you say the sentence you also file another entry in the case against yourself.

Set the case down. You are not the defendant here, and there is no prosecution running: what is written says the Lord knows them that are His, and the Holy Spirit is not measuring the length of a man's practice on a sea wall in February.

Now, I want to be careful about what I am not saying. I am not telling you that a short faith is superior to a long practice, which would be a fashionable lie and just as useless as the one you are carrying. The hour was good. The twenty three names were good. The psalm was good and the hymn behind the boat sheds was good, and none of it was wasted, and the loss of it is a real loss and you are allowed to feel it as one.

What I am telling you is narrower and it is the whole point. What remains is not the wreckage of a faith. It is a floor. And a floor does not have to be large to be a floor. It has to be underneath you and it has to hold, and you found out in a fifty mile an hour wind in February that yours does both.

You have enough to stand on this morning. Not enough to argue with, not enough to impress a room, enough to stand on: that is what His word does when it puts one line in the mouth of a man on an ash heap, and the same Spirit who put it there has kept nine words alive in you for four years while you were busy calling it a decline.