The Rail at the Shallow End

The tiles are wet and warm under his feet, and the whole building smells of chlorine and potato chips, and he is standing at the top of the steps at the shallow end with a towel over his shoulder like a man who has walked into the wrong room.

Saturday morning at the public pool is a wall of noise. In the next lane a children's class is learning to blow bubbles, eight of them in a row along the edge with their faces in the water and their legs going, and a mother on the bench is holding three coats and a phone. A lifeguard on the high chair is watching everything and nothing. Somebody has dropped a float and it is drifting toward the deep end on its own. And in the water at the bottom of the steps, waist deep, is a girl of about nineteen in a red rash vest with the center's logo on it, and she has just said, "Whenever you're ready," in the voice they teach them, and then, more kindly, his first name.

He is seventy-three. He has wanted to do this for fifty years and there was always a reason, and then his wife died and the reasons ran out and there was only the sentence. The sentence has been in him for about a decade now, and it did not arrive; it settled, the way a house settles, so quietly that you only notice when the door does not shut any more. Too far along. Too far along for anything in his life to start now. Not bitter, not dramatic. Just the account closed and the book put on the shelf.

And yet here he is with his hand on the cold steel rail, and one foot on the first step, and the water lapping the tile at exactly the level of a decision. The children in the next lane come up gasping and laughing. The girl in the red vest waits. He does not know whether he is going to go down the steps or pick up his towel and go home and tell nobody.

And you know that rail. Whatever your shallow end is, you have been standing at the top of it with a sentence in you that settled a while ago, and you have called it realism, and it has been quietly closing the account on the rest of your life. Too far along. Nothing starts now.

The psalm that puts old age in the present tense

Come and sit on the bench with the coats, and let us go slowly, because the sentence in you did not arrive loudly and it will not leave loudly either. You have not been lazy, and you have not been faithless. What has happened is subtler. Somewhere along the way you took the years you have left and drew a line under them, and you called the line honesty, and it was not honesty. It was arithmetic done without God in the room. And the Holy Spirit, who is not embarrassed by gray hair, has a psalm about that.

They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green.Psalm 92:14

Look at the shape of the sentence. Still. Bear. Old age. The psalm does not say they used to bear fruit, or they bore fruit once and are now remembered for it. It puts bearing in the present tense and old age in the same clause, and then it says the strangest thing: full of sap and green. Not dry and honored. Green. And I want you to see what the psalm says these people are, because it is not what you think. Two verses earlier: planted in the house of the LORD, they flourish in the courts of our God. Planted. That is the whole of their qualification. Not productive, not gifted, not young. Planted.

You are planted, and it is written that the planted still bear in old age, and I am not softening a psalm for you; that is the line as it stands. Fruit on this site is never output. It is what grows on something that stays attached and stays put, and the psalm has no age clause anywhere in it, and His Spirit is the sap it is talking about. The sap does not check your date of birth before it rises.

What He carries, and how far

There is another line, and I want to put it beside the first because they hold each other up. God is speaking, and He is comparing Himself to the idols that have to be carried about on carts, and He says this: even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save (Isaiah 46:4). Read who is doing what. You do not carry Him. He carries you. And He names the season out loud, old age, gray hairs, as the season He is still carrying in, not the season the carrying stops.

That matters here, because the sentence in you assumes that what comes of a life has to be lifted by the life. Too far along means too tired to lift it now. But the fruit was never lifted by the branch. Scripture says the branch cannot bear fruit by itself (John 15:4), which is as true of a young branch as an old one, and it is the vine that does the bearing, and He is not seventy-three. You have a God who carries to gray hairs and a vine that does not age, and the written word says both, and the Spirit who wrote them is the one at the shallow end.

The account was never yours to close

Now the honest part, because I will not promise you a thing this page cannot give. I do not know what grows on you from here. I am not going to tell you that you will learn to swim, or write the thing, or see the country, or make the friend, and I am certainly not going to tell you that God owes you a late harvest to make up for a long stretch. He does not work to your timetable, and He does not work to mine, and a promise about the shape of your fruit would be a promise nobody authorized. What is written is narrower than that and much stronger. Still bearing. Full of sap. Carried to gray hairs. The account is open.

And it was never yours to close. That is what I most want you to hear. When you drew the line under your years, you were not being realistic about God; you were doing sums about yourself, and He was not consulted. Anna was in her eighties, the text says, when she came into the temple at the hour the child was carried in and began speaking of Him to everyone who was waiting (Luke 2:36-38). She had been planted in that house for decades. Nobody would have called her season open. And she still bore, in old age, because she was planted and He was carrying, and neither of those had an expiry date.

You are not too far along, and I am not the one saying it: the psalm says still, the prophet says gray hairs, and the Holy Spirit is the green in old wood. Your age is not a problem to be got round. It is the season the psalm names as bearing.