Standing Beside The Water For Years

You know the exact spot where the sand goes firm.

You have stood on it more mornings than you could count. Not paddling. Standing, with the water coming to about your ankles at most, watching whoever is out there being out there.

You have driven other people down to this river mouth for eleven years. You have carried the boards. You have taught two nephews and a neighbor's daughter and one grown man who was terrified and is not any more.

And you have never once gone in past your ankles.

Not out of fear. There is no story here where something happened in water and you have avoided it since. You swim perfectly well and you would go in tomorrow if a child needed getting.

It is something quieter than that.

You have been waiting for a sign that it is your turn. Something that would tell you the water was for you as well as for the ones you carry the boards for, and it has not come, and you have not gone in.

Let me name what this is before we go on, because it is a wound and not a preference.

Somewhere back there, you learned that other people go in and you carry the boards.

I do not know exactly where or from whom and you may not either. But that got into you young, and it has held for eleven years on this river mouth alone, and nobody has ever named it to you as anything other than generosity.

Where the water parted

Here is a crossing, and the detail that matters is where the parting happened.

And as they that bare the ark were come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, (for Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest,) that the waters which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap.Joshua 3:15-16

Read the order.

The feet went in first. The parting happened after.

Not before. There was no sign given at the bank. There was no confirmation from a distance that this was going to work. The water was in flood, which the text goes out of its way to mention, and the men carrying the ark walked down to the edge and put their feet in it while it was still a river.

And then it stood up in a heap.

So the sign that has been awaited on this bank was never given to anybody at a bank. It was given at the point of contact, and it was given to the ones whose feet were already wet.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, at that river mouth with the light on the water.

You are permitted to step in without a confirmation. Not one day, not once something tells you it is your turn, not when somebody gives you a word about it. Right now, standing on the firm sand in the early morning, you are in the same position those men were in, and the sign came after the feet rather than before them. That is not my comfort. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real man in a real river.

Now, the crossing.

I want to say this carefully, because a man like you will turn a thing into an event if it is left to him.

There is no dramatic version required. Nobody has to be watching. You do not have to feel anything as you go. The whole of it is that you step in past your ankles on an ordinary morning, and the crossing is real whether or not the morning is remarkable.

Quiet counts. Today counts.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have a portion in this water that was never contingent on a sign. The word says the feet were dipped in the brim, which is a description of an ordinary step taken before anything visible happened, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real morning at a real river mouth.

Go in. That is the whole of the instruction and it has been available for eleven years.