Six Hours With Nothing Left to Secure

By two in the afternoon Reuben had done everything and the weather was still six hours out.

He is good at this. That is not boasting, it is a fact about a man who has lived on that coast for fifty-one years and has done it perhaps thirty times.

The boat was out and up on the trailer by ten. The trailer is chained. The loose sheeting on the shed is not loose any more and has not been since eleven. The gutters are clear. Both water containers are full and one of them is inside. The generator has been run for eight minutes to prove it starts, which he does every time, because a generator that has not been run is a rumor.

The neighbor two along, who is eighty-one, has her window boards on, because he did them at half past twelve without being asked and without saying anything about it afterward.

He has charged everything. He has moved the good chairs.

And at two o'clock he stood in his own yard and could not think of one more thing.

Six hours.

His aunt Merani was on the porch with a cup of tea, which is where she has been since the forecast changed, because she is eighty-six and gave up rushing at some point in the nineties.

She watched him walk the perimeter of that yard four times.

He checked the trailer chain that he had already checked. He went and looked at the sheeting. He came back out with a torch and put it somewhere else. He stood in the middle of the yard doing nothing, then went and moved the water container that was already inside about eight inches to the left.

And she said, without any edge in it at all, "Nephew. Sit down."

He said there might be something.

And she said, "There is not. You did it all by two. I watched you do it."

He sat on the top step. She let a minute go by.

Then she said, "This is the part you have never learned. You are excellent at the six hours before the six hours. And then there are these ones, and you spend them walking, and you arrive at the weather already worn out."

Now let me ask you what your six hours are.

Because there is a stretch, in whatever you are facing, where everything that is actually yours has been done. And it does not feel like it. It feels exactly like there should be one more thing, and so you walk the perimeter and check a chain you already checked.

Somebody drew a line before you got here

There is a passage in Job where God speaks for four chapters and does not answer the question Job asked, and in the middle of it He says this about the sea.

And I said, "Thus far you shall come, but no farther; and here shall your proud waves stop."Job 38:11

Read who is speaking to what. God is speaking to the water. The water is not an agent negotiating; it is a thing that has been given a boundary, and the boundary was set at a point long before anybody on that coast was born.

Thus far, and no farther. A limit, stated in advance, by somebody with the standing to state it.

Now hold that against a man walking a perimeter at two in the afternoon.

Reuben has spent the morning drawing lines: a chain, a board, a gutter, a container. Every one of them good work and every one of them worth doing. And at two o'clock he ran out of lines he could draw, and he kept walking anyway, because the alternative was to admit that the outer line is not his.

So hear this said over you in the middle of your own yard. You are inside a boundary that somebody else set, and the fact that you have run out of jobs is not the same as being unprotected. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence God said to the sea and settles it into a person who is pacing, which is a different work from that person agreeing it is true.

Now let me name the wound before I go one step further, because I am not going to lift anything until it has been said.

Somebody taught you that the outcome depends on your preparation.

Maybe not in words. Maybe it was a year when you were young and something went badly and there was an adult nearby who said, out loud, that if they had done one thing differently it would not have happened. Maybe it was just fifty-one years of being the one who does the boards for the neighbor.

Whatever it was, you learned it, and it has made you superb at the work and terrible at the waiting, and nobody has ever separated the two for you.

They come apart here.

The work is yours. Do all of it, and do it properly, and Scripture has nothing but respect for a person who prepares: it praises the one who sees danger and takes precautions, and it has no patience with a man who does nothing and calls it trust.

The line is not yours. It never was. Thus far and no farther was said by God to the sea, not by you to your yard, and the six hours are the hours in which that difference becomes obvious and unbearable.

You are held inside a limit you did not set and cannot see, and the running out of jobs is not the removal of your protection, it is the point at which your protection becomes visible as somebody else's work. That is written down, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a man sit on a step instead of walking a perimeter, and He does that in His own time.

And let me say what this article will not do.

It will not tell you the weather will miss you. I do not know that, and nobody who says it does. Job 38 is not a promise about outcomes; it is a statement about who sets limits, and Job did not get his question answered either.

But he got something. He got the size of the One asking, and it turned out that was what he had actually needed, and he said so afterward.

There was a movement five hundred years ago on a cold and windy set of islands whose people had almost no ability to secure anything: not their property, not their meetings, frequently not their own safety. They held that God governs the storm and sets its limit, and it did not make them careless. They were, by every account, formidably practical people. It made them able to sit down at two in the afternoon.