The End Of The Jetty

Two hundred paces. She has counted them enough times to know that it is two hundred, give or take, depending on the wind.

The jetty is old granite with a concrete cap poured over it sometime in the seventies, and by October the whole surface holds water in the low places, so Teresa walks out in boots and steps around the puddles she knows about without looking down.

At the far end there is a bollard, iron, painted white about four paint jobs ago, and the paint comes off on your coat if you lean on it wrong. That is where she reads.

First light, most days, for two years now.

She brings tea in a Thermos and drinks it out of the lid because the cup broke. She brings the small Bible with the soft cover that fits in a coat pocket, the one with the spine gone at Psalms because that is where she opens it most. And she reads for about twenty minutes while the sky goes from the color of a nickel to the color of an apricot, and then she walks the two hundred paces back and goes to work.

Nobody knows.

Her sister does not know. The woman at work who prays out loud for other people's sick cats does not know. Nobody at the last building she was part of knows, and how she came to be out here rather than in there is her own business and is not being written down anywhere this morning.

She has never told a single person about the jetty.

Some mornings that feels like a secret garden. Some mornings it feels like being the last person left after everyone else went inside, and she reads faster on those mornings, and the words go over her like weather.

This morning it is the second kind.

There is a boat going out through the channel, low and slow, a man in the wheelhouse with the window slid open because he likes the cold. Teresa is not thinking about him. She is thinking that she has now spent two years doing something that has no witnesses, and that a person can start to wonder whether a thing without witnesses is happening at all.

The boat comes level with the end of the jetty.

The man in the wheelhouse lifts one hand off the wheel. Not a wave exactly. The flat, unhurried lift of a hand that people who work on the water give to people who are standing on it, every morning, forever, whether they know each other or not.

Teresa lifts hers back.

He goes on out. She sits down on the wet edge of the bollard with the Thermos lid in both hands and finds that her eyes have gone hot, and she could not tell you exactly why, except that for about a second and a half this morning somebody saw her out here.

She opens the small Bible where the spine is gone.

Even there

Here is what this message is not going to do. It is not going to tell you to go back, and it is not going to tell you to stay out. It does not know your situation, it has not met the people involved, and a stranger handing down a ruling on where you should be on a Sunday morning would be doing something no stranger has any right to do.

So the ruling is not coming. What is coming is the other thing, the thing nobody has said to you in two years, and it is this.

He was already at the end of the jetty.

"If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."Psalm 139:9-10, KJV

Look at the two words that verse hinges on. Even there. David is not describing a place inside a program. He is naming the furthest edge a person could get to, the wings of the morning, the far side of the water, the last place anyone would look for a believer, and he says the hand is there and it is not reaching after him, it is leading him.

So take this in, standing where you actually are. You are led, not lost. Psalm 139 is where that is written, and His Spirit carried that line out to a jetty in October two years running, which is why the reading has kept happening even on the mornings you did not want to do it.

Nobody arrives at the end of a jetty by accident five days a week for two years. Something has been holding that. Habit does not hold like that. Guilt does not hold like that, guilt collapses inside a month. What has been getting you out of a warm bed and onto wet granite before the sky changes color is not your discipline and was never your discipline.

You have been kept. His word says the Lord upholds all those that fall and raises up all those that are bowed down, and the same Spirit who wrote that has had a hand under this whole arrangement while you assumed you were the one keeping it going.

And now the other half of what has been eating you, because it deserves an answer and not a pep talk. No witnesses. Two years and nobody knows. There is a particular kind of loneliness in that which people inside a building genuinely cannot picture, where you begin to wonder whether an unobserved faith is a real one, the way a person alone in a house starts to wonder if they have said anything out loud all day.

Hear this plainly. Your faith has never once been unobserved. It is already settled in Scripture that the darkness and the light are both alike to Him and that the night shines as the day, and it is His Spirit, not a congregation, that makes that true over an empty jetty at six in the morning.

The man in the wheelhouse lifting his hand did not make you visible. He reminded you that you already were.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not tell David to stay in the uttermost parts of the sea and call it home, and it does not tell him to hurry back either. It tells him whose hand is on him wherever the morning takes him. That is a bigger sentence than either instruction would have been, and it is the one handed to you.

So the question of buildings stays open. It is allowed to stay open. What is closed, and has been closed the whole time, is the question of whether you are His.

You are His out here. That is not this message being generous with you, it is Scripture in Romans saying nothing in height or depth or any other creature can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit signed His name to that and has never taken it off.