Dragging the River

It is the sound that gives him away, if anybody were down there to hear it, which nobody ever is at that hour.

The grapple goes in with a slap and then there is the long pull, and the rope comes back over the gunwale in that particular rhythm a man gets into when he has done a thing a great many times, and then nothing, and then he moves the boat twenty feet and does it again.

Wendell is sixty and he has been coming down to this stretch since the year his daughter was born, which is thirty-four years, and he does not do it every week, and he does not do it in front of anybody. It comes on him. Something will happen, or nothing will happen, and he will wake at four and know he is going to be on the water at five thirty with the grapple in the bottom of the boat.

He is not looking for anything he lost. He is looking for something he threw in.

He threw it in on purpose, a long time ago, in the way a man does when a preacher has said the right thing at the right moment and something breaks open. He drove down here on a Sunday afternoon in his good clothes and he stood on that gravel and he threw it as far as he could out over the deep part where the current cuts under the bank, and he said out loud, in front of God and a heron, that it was gone.

And it was. And he meant it. And he has been dragging that river ever since.

He would not use the word doubt. If you asked him he would say he believes God forgave him, and he would mean it as much as he meant it on the gravel. It is something else, and it is harder to say, and I think it is this: he cannot rest on a thing he has not seen with his own eyes. He needs to look at the bottom once. He needs to know that it is really down there and really covered, and every so often the need gets loud enough to put a man on the water before dawn with a grapple.

You have your own river. Maybe you never threw anything anywhere; maybe you just prayed it once. But you keep going back to check. You keep hauling it up in your mind to see if it is still gone, and I am not going to ask you what it was, because that is not what this is.

But I want to read you a prophet who chose his water carefully, and I want to ask you the practical question that nobody has asked you yet.

He picked the deep part

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.Micah 7:19

There is a lot in that verse, but look at where he put it.

Not into a field, where a man could walk out and find it. Not into a river, which is what Wendell chose, and a river can be dragged. Into the depths of the sea. And Micah was writing to people who had no diving equipment and no submarines and no way whatsoever of getting down there. The depths of the sea, in that world, was the one place that was final. A thing that went in there was not recoverable by anybody, ever, and everyone reading it knew that.

So the prophet picked the disposal site on purpose, and he picked it to be beyond retrieval, and he picked it for men exactly like Wendell.

You are dealing with something that went into water nobody can drag, and it is already there, and the place was chosen for its depth. I am not being poetic with a hard-headed man at five thirty in the morning. It is written in Micah 7:19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old prophet's careful choice of water and lays it on a man in a flat bottomed boat.

And who did the throwing

There is a second thing in that verse and it is the one that ought to take the grapple out of his hands.

Thou wilt cast. God does the casting. It is not Wendell standing in his good clothes on the gravel doing his best throw. It was never Wendell's arm that put it out past the current.

Which changes what the dragging means. If a man threw the thing himself, then checking on it is only prudence; he might have thrown short. But if God threw it, then dragging the river is a man going out at dawn to audit the arm of God.

Wendell would be horrified to hear it put that way, and I am not putting it that way to shame him. I am putting it that way because it is the only sentence that ever gets a man to stop.

You were not the one who threw it, and it is already cast by Him, and His arm has never once thrown short. Scripture says thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves the sentence from a man's arm to God's and makes a man put the rope down.

The question nobody has asked him

And here is the practical question, and it is the one that goes in like a splinter.

What will he do with it if he finds it?

He has never once thought that through. Thirty-four years of dragging and he has no plan for the catch. He is not going to bring it home. He is not going to look at it and be glad. If that grapple ever came up with the thing on it, the day would be the worst day of his life, and he knows it, and he has never once said it out loud to himself.

Which tells you what the dragging is really for. It is not an investigation. It is a ritual he performs to manage a feeling, and it has never once succeeded, because a feeling is not down there.

You are searching water for a thing that is not the problem, and it is already covered, and what is troubling you at four in the morning was never on the riverbed. It is written that He subdues our iniquities and cast them into the depths of the sea, and the Holy Spirit is the one who deals with the four in the morning, which no grapple has ever reached.