The Pier Before the Sun

He gets there at about twenty to five and there is nobody on it, which is the whole reason he gets there at twenty to five.

The pier runs out about two hundred yards and there is a bend in it near the end where the rail is worn smooth. He has been coming here since his uncle brought him at nine years old. The water is flat at that hour and it goes from black to gray to gold in about forty minutes, and the light comes up behind the point, and he has watched that happen probably a thousand times and has never once been bored by it.

If you asked him for the cleanest hour of his life, he would not have to think about it.

And about eight months ago something surfaced out there.

We are not going to describe it and I am not going to ask you what yours is. It surfaced, sideways and complete and out of nowhere, standing at the rail at ten past five with a line in the water and the sky just starting to go gray.

That happened once. What has happened since is the actual problem.

Because now he thinks about it on the drive over. Now there is a small tightening somewhere around the last turn before the parking lot. Now, when he walks out past the bend and puts his hands on the smooth part of the rail, some part of him is braced. He has started, twice, to not come.

And that is what has him. Not the arrival. It is that a thing which happened once, for a minute, has reached backward and forward and put its hand on the whole place. Forty years of that pier. His uncle's voice. A thousand sunrises. And there is now a film over all of it, and he cannot get underneath the film, and he has never told a living soul because he does not know how you would even begin to say it.

And you know that pier. You have a good place, or you had one, and something arrived in it once, and the arriving did not stay in the minute where it belonged. It spread. And now the place itself feels like somewhere things happen.

So take this in before we go one step further, because the light is coming up. You are not a man who spoiled his own good place. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a verse about a God who has never expected a man to be sturdier than He made him, and the Holy Spirit is out on this pier with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The one measurement with no midpoint

There is a line in a psalm about distance, and the thing to notice is which distance got chosen, because the choice is doing all of the work.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

He could have said north from south. North and south have ends. There is a north pole and a south pole, and the distance between them is a real, measurable, finite thing, and if you travel far enough north you begin traveling south.

East and west do not work like that. There is no east pole. Travel east as far as you like and you never begin traveling west. The two never meet, there is no midpoint, and the distance is not a large number, it is a distance with no number available at all.

That was not an accident of poetry. That is a man choosing, out of every image available to him, the one measurement on earth that has no far end.

You are that far removed from it, and the distance was picked precisely because it cannot be closed. The written word chose the only pair of directions with no meeting point, which means the removal is not a large distance that something could travel back across; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that distance out onto a pier at ten past five in the morning.

And notice the verb. Hath removed. Not: is removing. Not: will remove when you are steadier. It is done, and it was done by Him, and there is no clause in the sentence about the condition of the person it was done for.

Why one minute spread over forty years

I want to explain what happened to your pier, because if you think you did it you will keep away from it, and that would be the real loss.

What happened is not spiritual and it is not a judgment. It is how attention works. A thing that arrives in a place gets filed with the place, and after that the place calls up the thing, and the calling up is not a decision you make. It is automatic and it is fast and it works exactly the same way in every human being alive.

Which means the film over your pier was not laid down by anything you did or agreed to. It was laid down by the ordinary machinery of a mind that connects what happens to where it happened, and that machinery was running long before you got there and does not consult you.

You were not the one who spoiled it, and the spreading was mechanical rather than moral. Isaiah 41:13 says I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee, and both the holding and the speaking belong to Him in that sentence; His Spirit does that holding at whatever pace He keeps and He is not assessing how braced you were on the drive over.

And there is a second half. The reason you have started, twice, to not come, is that a person protects a good thing by keeping away from where it can be damaged further. That instinct is not cowardice. It is what you would do with anything you loved. But applied here it gives away the pier entirely, and hands over forty years and your uncle's voice and a thousand sunrises in exchange for avoiding a minute.

You are not being asked to make yourself go anywhere, and nobody is grading your courage. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to them that are of a broken heart, and it describes where He already stands rather than a place you have to reach; the same Spirit doing that standing near is the one who has had you on that pier since you were nine.

And if what surfaces out there is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone at twenty to five. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you do not have to be finished in front of.

Taking the pier back one morning at a time

Here is the practical shape of this and it is not heroic.

You do not take a place back by feeling differently about it. You take it back by going, and saying one sentence out loud when the tightening starts, and then fishing.

Not fighting the tightening. Not analyzing where it came from. Not waiting until the drive over feels clean, because if you wait for that you will wait past the rest of your life. You go, and when it starts you say the sentence out loud, and then you put a line in the water and watch the sky go from black to gray to gold the way it has done a thousand times.

And a place that has had a sentence said out loud on it for thirty mornings is a different place from a place that has been avoided for thirty mornings. That is not a technique. That is just what happens.

You are able to go tomorrow, and going with a sentence ready is the whole of it. Scripture says as far as the east is from the west so far hath He removed our transgressions from us, and it is a clause that can be spoken aloud on a pier by anybody; the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept the smooth part of that rail waiting for you.

So the pier is not spoiled. It is two hundred yards of wood with a bend in it, and the water goes gold at about ten past five, and something arrived there once and does not own it.