Two Lines Facing The Water

At six fifty in the morning Curtis drives past the turn for the highway and takes the gravel road down to the lake instead.

He does not decide to. His hands do it. There is a meeting at nine where he will be asked to put his name under a paragraph, and he has read the paragraph four times, and every time he reads it he agrees with about eighty percent of it, and eighty percent is not a thing you can sign.

The gravel road ends at a turnaround with two picnic tables and a rail. He parks facing the water and turns the engine off.

Mist is sitting on the lake the way it does in August, in flat sheets, moving slower than the water underneath it. There is a heron standing in the shallows on the left, absolutely still, looking like a decision somebody made a long time ago and never revisited.

Curtis pours coffee into the green plastic thermos cup, the one with the chip out of the rim that he has never replaced because his hand knows where the chip is.

He was seven years old on this lake. Family camp, the last week of August, eight cabins and a dining hall with a screen door that never closed properly. Every evening the grown ups went down to the shore and sang, and the song was long, and he never learned the whole thing.

He learned two lines.

He sang them facing the water, because the grown ups were behind him and he was too shy to face people. He did not know what the lines meant. He could not have told anybody. He had a vague, enormous, completely certain sense that they were about somebody who was there, and that the somebody was good, and that was the entire content of his theology at seven years old, standing on cold sand in a life jacket he had not been allowed to take off.

Thirty eight years and a lot of reading later, Curtis knows exactly what those two lines mean. He can source them. He can tell you which tradition they came out of and which argument that tradition was having at the time and who objected to the second line and why.

He sits in the car with the coffee going cold in the chipped cup and tries to remember the rest of the song.

He cannot. Nobody could. It has been thirty eight years.

But the two lines are right there, sitting where they have always sat, under everything he has read since, the way a floor sits under furniture.

He looks at the mist and the heron. Then he says the two lines out loud, in the car, at six fifty in the morning, facing the water.

His voice sounds ridiculous to him for about half a line. Then it does not.

He sits there for a minute after. Nothing dramatic happens. The heron does not move. The meeting is still at nine and the paragraph is still eighty percent.

But something underneath the paragraph got its feet back.

The floor under the furniture

Start with what this is not, because the wrong version of this message has been sold to a lot of tired people. This is not an invitation to unlearn anything.

The reading was good. The arguments taught you real things and some of those things saved you from real error and nobody is asking you to hand any of it back. A person who has thought hard about God for thirty eight years has done something worth doing. Nobody here is going to tell you that your education was the injury.

And the seven year old on the cold sand did not know more than you. He knew far less. He could not have defined a single term. That is not the point and it never was.

The point is that what he had hold of was true, and it is still true, and it did not stop being true when you found out how complicated it was.

So hear this while the mist sits on the water. You have not moved off the thing you first believed. His word says God has ordained strength out of the mouth of babes, which means the first thing you said about Him was not a rough draft, and the Holy Spirit who ordained that strength has not withdrawn it from a forty five year old in a parked car.

"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger."Psalm 8:2, KJV

Read what that verse does with a child's mouth. It does not humor it. It ordains strength out of it, and the strength is aimed at something: the enemy and the avenger get stilled by it. God took the smallest, least equipped, least briefed voice in the room and made it load-bearing on purpose.

That is what you sang facing the water. You were not making a child's approximation of the real thing. You were making the sound God chose to ordain strength through, and He is not embarrassed by it now that you can spell. That is what stands written in Psalm 8:2, and the line is His, and the Spirit still breathing on it is His too.

Here is where people get turned around. They think the choice is between the two lines and the thirty eight years, so they either throw out the reading and call it purity, or they keep the reading and quietly assume the two lines were sentiment. Both moves are a loss and neither is necessary.

Underneath is not instead of. A floor is not in competition with the furniture standing on it. You can own every chair in that room and still need to know where the floor is, and there are mornings, usually before seven, when a person needs to put a hand down and feel something that does not move.

You have that floor, and it is not nostalgia. Scripture calls it a foundation laid, one that no one lays twice, and the same Spirit who laid it is holding it steady under a man with a chipped thermos cup and a meeting at nine.

Notice too what the verse is doing about enemies. The child's mouth stills the avenger. The accusing voice that has been telling you that you are a fraud with a library card, that you believed once and then talked yourself out of it and then talked yourself back in and none of it counts, is stilled by the plainest sentence you own, not by the cleverest one.

So go back underneath. Not backward. Underneath. The two lines are not behind you in time, they are beneath you in position, and a man can stand on them at any age without giving up one book.

And when you get there, say them. Out loud, in the words you actually had then, not the improved version you could write now. The improved version is a fine piece of work and it is not what God ordained strength out of. It is already settled in Psalm 8 whose voice He uses, and the Holy Spirit is not looking for better wording from you this morning.