When the Tide Goes Out

He knows the timetable now, and knowing it is worse than not knowing it.

It goes about five weeks. For five weeks he is fine, and by fine he means the whole thing is simply true: he prays in the truck, he means the words at church, he can talk about God to his brother without anything catching in his throat. Then it goes out. Not dramatically. There is no crisis and nothing happens. He just wakes up one morning and the whole thing has drained away in the night and what is left is a flat gray expanse where the water used to be, and he can see everything on the bottom, and none of it is beautiful.

That lasts eight or nine days. Then it comes back in, and he never notices it coming, and he is fine again, and he does not talk about any of it to anybody.

What has changed lately is that he has started planning around it. That is the part that frightens him. He does not put himself forward for anything at church in the low weeks. He does not read in the low weeks, because reading in the low weeks makes it worse. He has begun, without ever deciding to, to organize a whole life around the assumption that his standing with God has a tide in it, and that on the low days he is further out than he was.

He is at the far end of the reef this afternoon with a bucket, walking on ground that is only ground twice a day, and the water is a long way off, and he is thinking the thing he thinks every time: a man who is really His would not have weeks like this.

I am not going to hurry past that. That sentence has been sitting in him for a long time and it deserves to be looked at properly rather than covered over with something bright. There is a real low water here and pretending otherwise would insult it.

But I want to ask one question of it, and then I want to show you what Peter wrote to people who were living in a much harder low than yours.

Who told you the water was what was holding you up?

Name the low water before anybody lifts it

First, honestly: the low weeks are real. They are not imagined, they are not sin, and they are not something to be talked out of by a person who has never had one. Something genuinely goes. The warmth goes. The sense of nearness goes.

And second, just as honestly: the reef does not go.

At low water you can walk out and stand on rock that has been there for longer than anyone can measure. It does not appear when the tide comes in and vanish when it goes out. The water moves. The rock is what the water moves over. And a man standing on that rock at low water, feeling exposed and unlovely and far from the sea, is standing on precisely the same rock he was standing on when it was fifteen feet under a blue surface and beautiful.

Now hear Peter, writing to people scattered and under pressure, and hear where he puts the keeping.

Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.1 Peter 1:5

Kept by the power of God. Not kept by the strength of your grip, and not kept by the height of your water. Peter is writing to people whose circumstances had gone flat and gray, and he does not tell them to raise their tide. He tells them who is doing the keeping.

You are kept by the power of God, and it is already His power doing it, and it is doing it on the low days at exactly the same strength as on the high ones. I am not saying that from a comfortable place across from a tired man. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a word written to scattered people out onto a reef at low water.

The tide is not the measure of the ocean

There is something a person learns growing up near water that a person growing up inland has to be told.

The tide is not the sea. The tide is what the sea is doing at the edge, today, under the pull of things very far away. Out past the reef the ocean is the same ocean at every hour of every day, and its depth is not a report on what is happening at your feet on the flat.

You have been reading the edge and calling it the whole thing.

You have a life in Christ that is not measured at the waterline, and it is already whole, and its depth is not what your feet can feel this afternoon. Scripture says your life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3), which puts it out past where any tide of yours reaches, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that written line steady under a man on a gray morning.

And here is the thing about the low weeks that he has never considered. He assumes they are when he is furthest from God. They may well be the weeks when he is closest to actually learning something, because a man who can only stand when the water is high has not yet found out what he is standing on.

Faith is not the same as feeling faith

One more, because it is the hinge.

Peter says kept by the power of God through faith. And in a low week, a man will look for his faith the way he looks for his keys, feeling in every pocket, and not find it, and conclude that it is gone.

But faith is not the sensation of faith. Faith is what you are actually leaning on, and you can tell what a man is leaning on by what he does when the feeling goes. This man got up. This man walked out onto the reef with a bucket. This man is still turning the same question over toward God rather than away from Him, in week eight of a nine day low, which is not the behavior of a man with no faith. It is the behavior of a man with faith and no weather.

You are believing right now, in the low water, and it is already faith, and it does not become faith later when it feels better. It is written that we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who calls a thing faith when it is walking with nothing to look at.