The Tide Line He Counts By

Dusk on the beach below the road, the good hour, when the water goes the color of a copper pot and the wet sand holds the sky upside down. He walks down here most evenings. Not for anything. His shoes are in his hand and the foam comes up over his feet and goes back out again, the way it has done since before anybody was here to watch it.

He counts tides. That is a real habit and he came by it honestly: his grandfather could tell you how many had run since a boat went out, and taught him that the sea keeps a very simple sort of book, two full turns a day, no arguing with it, no exceptions made for anybody's feelings.

So he counts. And somewhere in the middle of the counting he always arrives at the other number.

Eleven. Eleven years of asking God about the same thing in the same body. Eleven years of the same words getting quieter. He knows the number to the month, actually. He could give you the season it started and the room he was in.

Here is what he does not do. He does not say the number out loud.

He said it out loud three times, in three different years, to three good people who loved him, and every one of them handed him something back. One handed him a reason. One handed him a question about his life, gently, the way you hand somebody a bill you would rather not present. One handed him a book. And every one of those three exchanges cost him something he did not have to spare, so now he counts the years the way he counts the tides, privately, in his own head, watching the light go copper on the water, and when somebody asks how he is doing he says: still here.

The tide comes up over his feet and goes back out.

That is you, perhaps, on your own tide line, with your own number that has stopped being spoken. You have counted it and you know it to the month. You have stopped saying it out loud, not because you are hiding from God, but because the last time you said it, somebody in a kind voice tried to solve it, and you would rather carry the number in silence than be handed one more explanation for it.

The number and the theories

I am going to start by telling you what I am not going to do on this page, because it matters more than anything I could add.

I am not going to explain your eleven years. I do not know why. I am not going to tell you what God is doing in them, or what He is after, or what it is producing, or what you would understand if you could see it from higher up. I do not know, and neither does the person who told you they did. If I hand you a reason tonight I have done exactly what those three good people did, and you would carry my sentence around for another eleven years the way you have carried theirs.

And I am not going to go looking for the missing key. There is no key. There is no forgotten thing you need to remember, no door you left open, no phrase you have been saying slightly wrong. If a page ever hands you a checklist for why God has not moved, close the page. The reason nobody can produce that checklist is that it does not exist, and building one out of a hurting person's history is a cruelty with a Bible cover on it.

What I have instead is a verse from a man on the run, hiding in a foreign city, with a number of his own he could have recited to the month.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Read it slowly. Three claims, and every one of them is about record keeping. God tells, meaning counts, meaning numbers, David's wanderings. Not his victories, his wanderings: the going back and forth, the years that did not arrive anywhere. Then the tears go into a bottle, which is an image so tender it is almost funny, God bending down over the mess with a container. And then the question that is not really a question: are they not in thy book?

You have a count that is already written down, and it was written by the only One with the standing to keep it. Psalm 56:8 says the wanderings are told and the tears are kept, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about a hunted man in Gath and lays it over a man on a beach at dusk with his shoes in his hand.

What God has never once asked you for

Look at what is missing from that verse, because the absence is the whole comfort.

There is no explanation in it. David does not get told why the wandering ran as long as it did. There is no lesson attached to the tears, no purpose stamped on the bottle, no note in the margin of the book saying what the count was for. God simply keeps it. He counts what nobody else counted and He keeps what everybody else told you to get over, and He does it without one word of commentary.

And there is no invoice. He never asks David to justify the number. Nobody at that shoreline is required to explain to God why it has run eleven years before he is allowed to stand there.

You are held by One who has never asked you to justify the count. It is written into the shape of Psalm 56:8, where the record is kept and no reason is demanded, and His Spirit is the one who makes that verse feel like a hand on the back rather than a nice thought about a dead king.

Now let me name the pit, since we are here.

The pit is that the silence gets read as a verdict. Eleven years go by, and somewhere around year four or five a person stops experiencing the quiet as quiet and starts experiencing it as an answer. A judgment that came in without a letter. And once that has happened, going to God feels like going back to a courtroom to hear a sentence read again, so the visits get shorter, and then they stop, and the number keeps counting in the dark where nobody has to say it.

Nobody here failed to have enough faith. Say that out loud on the sand if you have to. That sentence is not in Psalm 56 and it is not in the mouth of God, and the person who put it in you, however kindly they meant it, was speaking past the end of what they knew.

Right now, as you read, you are standing inside a welcome that eleven years of quiet has not withdrawn. Psalm 56:8 keeps the record and issues no verdict alongside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an open door tonight rather than a fact about somebody else's psalm.