The Wall the Water Took

Low tide is at six forty and he is down there at six thirty, which he tells himself is a coincidence.

The gap is about eleven feet. You can see where it starts and where it stops because either side of it the stones are still stacked the way the four of them stacked them, tight, with the small ones packed in behind, and then for eleven feet there is nothing but wet sand and a scatter of rock that got rolled around by the water and dropped wherever.

Four winters. Not four summers, four winters, because that is when the work happened, that is when you can get at it, that is when it is cold enough that your hands stop being hands after two hours. He was thirty nine when they started and he is forty seven now, and he has a shoulder that clicks and a memory of a February morning where the wind came off the water so hard that a man twice his size sat down on the stones and laughed and could not get up.

And now there is a gap in it, and the county says the gap is going to get bigger, and there is no money and there is no crew and nobody is going to stack anything again.

He is standing in the gap. That is the part he did not plan. He walked out along the wall the way he has a hundred times and got to the end of the good stones and just kept walking, and now he is standing in the eleven feet where his own work used to be, with the water a long way out and the light going gold behind him.

And he says it out loud. He has never said it out loud in his life. He says: I worked for nothing.

It sounds worse out loud. That is the thing nobody tells you. In your head it is a thought and you can move it around. Out loud, on a beach, with nobody there, it is a sentence with a verdict in it, and the verdict is not really about the wall. It is about him. Four winters and a shoulder and nothing, and if that is what four winters of him produces, then that is what he is.

You have stood in that gap. It might not be stone. It might be a marriage, a business, a department, a stretch of years you gave the strong part of yourself to that is not there any more. And you have said the sentence, or you have refused to say it because you were afraid of what saying it would make true. Here is what nobody told you: that sentence is in the Bible, word for word, in the mouth of somebody God does not correct.

The sentence God did not correct

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that rushes in with a reason. The wall taught you something. The wall was preparation. God had a plan for the eleven feet. I am not going to do that to you, and not because it would be unkind. Because Scripture does not do it, and I am not allowed to improve on Scripture.

In Isaiah 49 there is a servant speaking, and four verses in he stops and says this: Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing, and in vain (Isaiah 49:4). That is the whole sentence, and God does not interrupt it, and God does not explain it, and there is no footnote underneath saying that actually it was not in vain because of the following three reasons.

You are standing in a gap that Scripture has stood in before you. Isaiah 49:4 is not a moment of weak faith that the chapter goes on to scold; it is put in the mouth of the Servant, and the Spirit who inspired it left it in, which means the sentence you were ashamed of saying on a beach is a sentence the Holy Spirit thought worth preserving.

Now read what the servant says next, in the same breath, without taking anything back. Yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God. He does not say the work succeeded. He says the work is with God, which is a different claim entirely: the assessment has been handed over. Somebody else holds the file. He is not going to be the one who decides what four winters came to.

Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God.Isaiah 49:4

Handing over the judgment

Here is the move in that verse, and it is not optimism.

He does not swap a bad total for a good one. He does not go home and decide the wall was worth it after all. He takes the file out of his own hands and puts it in God's, and then he stops. That is the whole of it. The judgment is with the Lord. Not with the county, not with the water, and not with a man standing in eleven feet of wet sand at half past six in the evening.

This is yours right now, in the gap: the right to stop being the judge of your own four winters. Scripture puts it plainly in 1 Corinthians 4:5, judge nothing before the time, and the Spirit who carried that into the letter did not carve out an exception for the man judging himself.

And let me name what is actually being judged, because it is not the wall. It is him. That is why saying it out loud was so bad. The sentence started as a report about stone and arrived as a verdict about a person, and it made that jump so fast he did not see it happen. It is worth seeing.

You were never the same object as your work, and the water has no jurisdiction over you. Isaiah 43:1 says He has called you by your name and you are His, and He said it to people whose whole national project had been taken apart; the Spirit who spoke that over ruins is speaking it over a gap tonight.

What the water cannot take

Now the part that the arithmetic never had a column for.

Four winters of stacking stone in the cold produced a wall, and the water took eleven feet of it. Four winters of stacking stone in the cold also produced something in the man, and in the three men beside him, and in whoever watched from the road, and the water has no way to get at any of that. That is the difference between output and fruit, and it is not a word game on a beach in February.

Output is what you can point at. It sits in the world and the world can take it back. Fruit is what grew on a branch that stayed attached, and John 15:5 says the branch does not do the growing, it stays, and the fruit goes out into other people where nothing can be rolled around and dropped by a tide.

It is already yours, and no tide is coming for it. Galatians 5:22 lists what the Spirit grows and every item on it is a thing that lives in a person rather than on a shore, and the Holy Spirit grew those in four winters of cold work that a man has written off entirely.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program out of me. One thing. On the walk you already take, tell Him about one morning out on those stones that produced nothing at all. The wind. Somebody's flask. A thing you thought about with your hands going numb. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. That is a branch in a vine. No tide reaches it.