I Have Not Been To The Water

Four hundred yards. He could throw a stone most of the way.

He was down there every morning of his life until the letter, and now he is not, and it has been fourteen months, and nobody in the house has asked him about it because everybody in the house knows.

Eleven years the case ran. Meetings in a hall with a bad ceiling. Three lawyers, two of whom were good. A day in a city where he wore a jacket he had bought for a funeral and answered questions from a man who kept calling the place by the wrong name.

They lost. Not narrowly, and not on the facts, which is the part that will not sit down in him.

His grandmother took him out there at four years old and told him what everything was called, and now he goes out the back way to the road, which takes longer and means he does not have to see it.

He has not stopped believing anything. He goes on Sundays. He said grace at his daughter's table last month.

He just cannot go down to the water.

If there is a place you cannot go to anymore, you know exactly what I mean. And nothing on this page is going to tell you what those eleven years were for.

What the water is saying

Let me say first what I am not going to do, because there has probably been enough of it.

I do not know why that case went the way it went. I am not going to tell you that God was doing something, or that there is a larger plan in which the letter makes sense, or that the eleven years will be redeemed on some schedule I have invented. I was not there. Nobody writing at a distance was.

What can be said is not a reason. It is a description of what a deep place actually does.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

This is the psalm of a man who cannot go to the place he used to go. That is the whole setting of it: he remembers going up with the crowd and he is not there now, and he is somewhere with a river and a mountain and a great deal of grief.

And in the middle of it he says something extraordinary. He does not say the deep is empty. He says deep calls to deep, which means the depth he is in is speaking to a depth in God, and the two are in conversation over his head while he is going under.

You are in a deep place that is already in conversation with God, and the waves going over you have not interrupted it. That is not my comfort. It is written in Psalm 42:7, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

Notice what the psalmist never does. He never explains his situation. He never says it is for something. He describes it accurately, tells God he is going under, and goes on speaking.

So fourteen months of the back way has not been faithlessness. You have been heard from down here the whole time, and the deep you are in has never once been out of earshot. The word settled that before your grandmother took you out, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on that path while you read this.

A place is not the same as a verdict

Here is what happens to ground that a man stops walking on, and it is worth naming.

The water did not do anything to you. The letter did. But the letter arrived while you were the man who goes to the water, and now the two are joined in you, so that going down there means standing in the place where the losing lives.

That is not superstition and it is not weakness. It is how a person is made, and any man who has ever avoided a hospital corridor or a particular song knows it.

But it costs, and the cost is not the case. The case is lost either way and no walk fixes that.

The cost is that the water was yours before the case, by about sixty years, and the letter has taken it retroactively. Fourteen months of the back way is the letter still working.

You have a place that was given to you long before any hearing and cannot be awarded to anybody in a room in a city. Psalm 42 has the deep calling to the deep in the middle of the going under; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to stand somewhere hard and stay standing.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the road you are on. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger right now, use your emergency number. That is not weakness. That is what a man does when the ground goes.