The Tide Does Not Ask Why

Sione can tell you, now, about four days out.

That is what he has come to and it is worse than anything that came before it. There was a time when it arrived without warning and that was frightening in an ordinary way. Now it announces itself. There is a particular quality to a Tuesday, a certain kind of tiredness that is not ordinary tiredness, a thing he notices about how he is answering people, and he knows.

Four days out. Sometimes five.

And he has become, without ever deciding to, an accurate forecaster of himself, which is a horrible skill to develop, because a forecast does two things at once. It gives you time. And it removes every last shred of the belief that this is something happening to you rather than something you are.

An accident is a thing that happens. A pattern with a schedule is a thing you are. That is the logic and he has never once been able to argue with it.

He watches the tide from a place above the rocks most evenings, and he has thought about the comparison a hundred times and always thrown it out, because it flatters him. The tide is not a moral event. Nobody blames water.

But there is one part of it he keeps coming back to, and he cannot make it fit anywhere, so it just sits there.

It is that the tide comes back in over exactly the same rocks. Every time. The same ones. It has been covering those particular stones twice a day since before anybody was here, and nobody has ever once described that as a failure of the sea.

He does not know what to do with that thought. He knows it is not an argument. It just refuses to leave.

And there is a second thing that has come with the forecasting, and it is the part he would be most ashamed to say out loud.

He has started to organize around it. Quietly. A commitment he does not make for the end of a certain week. A conversation he moves. A visit he pushes back, always with a real reason, and the real reason is always available because life supplies them endlessly. Nobody has noticed and nobody would.

So the shape is no longer only a thing that happens to him. It has begun to have a say in the calendar, and a thing with a say in the calendar is running something, and he knows exactly what it is running.

And this is where I stop writing about Sione, because you can predict yourself now too.

I am not going to ask what the shape is and I am not going to ask how far out you can see it coming. That is yours and it stays yours.

The word in that verse is all

I want to give you a line with one word in it that is doing more work than the rest of the verse combined.

The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.Psalm 145:14

All that fall.

Not some. Not the ones who fell unexpectedly. Not the first time offenders, not the ones with a good reason, not the ones whose collapse had dignity in it. All.

And it is worth being precise about what that word does, because you have spent years quietly assuming you had aged out of a category. All has no exceptions clause anywhere after it. There is no second half of that verse that begins with the word unless.

So take this where you actually stand, on a Tuesday you can already read. You are inside the word all, and Psalm 145:14 says the Lord upholdeth all that fall, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a specific person on a specific evening rather than leaving it a general statement about humanity.

Now look at the tense of the two verbs, because this is the other half of it.

Upholdeth. Raiseth. Present continuous, ongoing, the way you would describe something a person habitually does. Not upheld once. Not will uphold, at the end, if the record is acceptable. This is written as a description of what God is like, in the same way you would say that the sea comes in.

Which is what to do with the thought you cannot get rid of. The tide is not an argument about your character, and it was never meant to be. It is a picture of a thing that happens again and again without anybody calling it a failure, and the written word puts God's upholding in exactly that grammar, and the Spirit of God has been doing it on every one of those Tuesdays whether or not you could feel Him at it.