The Tide Chart by the Back Door

The chart is one sheet of paper with the year printed across the top in small type, and it has been pinned to the back porch wall beside the door since January.

He leaves his boots on the step and goes to it with the pencil that lives on a string from the nail. High water, six fifty two. He draws a short line under the figure, the way he has drawn a short line under every high water since he was a young man with his first boat. The paper has gone soft at the corners from the salt in the air.

Sunday evening. The kettle is grumbling away in the kitchen behind him. Through the window the harbor is doing the thing it does at this hour, every boat swung round on its mooring and all of them facing the same way, and the light coming in low and orange off the water and up the whitewashed wall of the house next door.

He steps back to look at the sheet, and something in him goes quiet.

He can account for the water. Every tide on that paper is marked and he knows what most of them did. He knows which mornings were flat and which ones he stayed in and which one took the fender off the stern. It is all there in his own pencil, and it is honest.

And he could not tell you one thing he has said to God in all that marking.

Not because anything went wrong. It did not go anywhere. The days go to the boat and the yard and the phone and the long evening with the television on in the corner, and he is not ashamed of a single one of them, and he could not put them in front of God either, because putting them in front of God would mean looking at them properly, and he has been careful, without once deciding to be, not to.

The kettle clicks off. He hangs the pencil back on its string and goes in.

You keep a chart of your own, whatever it is made of, and you already know what is marked on it. That is not the hard part. The hard part is the idea that God would have to be shown.

The chart was never an audit

I want to name the thing you brace for, and then take it off the table.

The inventory is what you brace for. Somewhere at the back of it sits the idea that coming near God again begins with a full and accurate account of where the days have gone, read out item by item, with somebody nodding slowly at each one. And because the shape of that list is roughly visible from here, the porch door stays shut.

So look at what is written about the account:

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:2-3

Read the last word again. Acquainted. Not informed. Not notified. Not handed a summary at the door and left to draw conclusions from it. Acquainted is what a person is with a road they have walked a thousand times in every kind of weather, and David uses it about the whole ordinary shape of a life: the sitting down, the getting up, the lying down, the paths. The unremarkable hours are the exact hours the verse names.

You are already known at the address where you actually live, and He was acquainted with all of it long before you were willing to look at any of it. That is not a kind thing I am putting over you. It is written in Psalm 139, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept a small light burning in you long enough for you to still be reading.

There is no audit because there is no gap in His knowledge to fill. An audit is for somebody who was not there. He was there for the flat mornings and the long evenings and the marking of the chart, and none of it changed His mind about coming.

He did not have to be shown

There is a man in the gospel of John who gets seen before he has said anything worth recording.

Nathanael is sitting under a fig tree. Nobody writes down what he was doing, because he was not doing anything. It is the most ordinary half hour of his week. Then Philip brings him along, and before a single word of introduction has been managed, Jesus tells him where he has just been sitting.

Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.John 1:48

Notice what does not happen next. No account is requested. Nathanael is not asked what he was doing under the tree, or why he had not been somewhere more useful. The seeing arrives on its own and it arrives warm, and the whole guard of the man comes down in one line, because being seen without being sentenced is a thing almost nobody expects and everybody recognizes.

You were seen under your own fig tree, in the hour when nothing at all was happening, and the seeing came with no verdict attached to it. John 1:48 is the ground I am standing on to say that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence land on a living person on a porch on a Sunday evening.

That is the whole difference between being watched and being known. Watching gathers material. Knowing comes toward you. God knows the address, He has always known the address, and He came to it.

One honest thing, with nothing promised after it

Now the part that will feel too small, and is not.

There is a habit that goes with any honest sentence about ourselves, and it is to fasten a repair to the end of it so the sentence becomes bearable. I have let this go, and I am going to sort it out. The repair is not honesty. The repair is a negotiation, and it changes what the first half of the sentence was for. It turns a moment of being seen into an offer, and the moment cannot survive that.

The welcome was never on those terms. Scripture leaves no clause in the middle of the verse where a plan is supposed to go. He is acquainted with all my ways, and nothing in that sentence waits on a proposal from me.

You have the standing to say one true thing about where your days go and then stop, and the stopping is not laziness, it is trust. The word says He is acquainted already, so the plan was never the price of admission, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind the sentence with a form to be signed.

One honest thing. Said once, out loud, to God, and left there.