Eleven Lines

By the end of that summer there were eleven lines on Uncle Manny's boat.

She is not a big boat. Six meters, an outboard, a windscreen held on with two jubilee clips and a story. She sits on a swinging mooring in a harbor that has never lost a boat in living memory, on a mooring buoy that the harbor authority services every second spring.

Eleven lines.

Two bow lines, which is normal. A spring line, which is thoughtful. Then a second spring, then a stern line running back to a ring on the wall which is not what that ring is for, then a length of blue rope that used to be on a trailer, then a ratchet strap, an actual ratchet strap, and then some things that I would not know what to call.

He did it a bit at a time. That is how these things happen. There was a bad blow in the June and one line chafed through, and he replaced it and added another, and then he could not sleep the night of the next blow, so he went down at eleven at night in the rain and added a third, and after that it just kept going.

My cousin and I rowed out one morning to bail her and we sat there in the dinghy for a while looking at it.

He came down at about seven and stood on the wall with his coffee.

"You have got eleven on her, Manny," my cousin called up.

And he said, "I know."

We rowed back in and the three of us sat on the wall, and my cousin, who is kinder than me, said the thing.

"Uncle. What is under the buoy?"

Manny said, "Concrete block."

"How big?"

"Two ton. Maybe more. It has been down there since before I was born."

"So the block is holding the buoy."

"Yes."

"And the buoy is holding the boat."

Long pause. The gulls going.

"Yes."

"So what are the eleven lines holding?"

And Manny stood there with his coffee going cold and said, quietly, "Me. They are holding me."

Now let me ask you about your Monday.

Sunday was good. Or the retreat was good, or the drive home was good, or the twenty minutes on a Tuesday morning three weeks ago when something in you actually settled and you knew you were loved.

And then Monday came, and you began adding lines.

An extra practice, a tightening up, a plan for the week designed to keep the thing from drifting. Not because you doubt God. Because you have quietly concluded that Sunday will not hold until Friday without your rope work, and you have never once tested that conclusion.

The rest is a place you enter, not a state you maintain

Hebrews says something about rest that is worded so strangely people skate over it, and the strangeness is where the freedom is.

For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.Hebrews 4:10

Notice the verb. Entered. Not achieved, not maintained, not sustained. Entered, which is what you do with a room, and once you are in a room you are not holding it up.

And then the comparison, which is the part that should stop you: as God did from His. When God rested on the seventh day, He was not exhausted and He was not on a break. He rested because the work was complete. That is the kind of resting on offer. Not recovery. Completion.

So hear this said over you, this Monday, with all eleven lines in your hands. You are held by a finished work and not by your rope work, and the peace you got on Sunday was never resting on your Monday. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the actual keeping power in a person's week, which means the thing you have been quietly crediting to your own diligence has been His the entire time.

Now let me name the wound in this, because I am not going to lift anybody before naming it.

Somebody taught you that you were the weak link.

Maybe not in words. But you came away from somewhere with the understanding that God does His part and then it is over to you, and that whatever happens to the thing He gave you is now a reflection of how well you looked after it. And so every good thing He has ever given you has arrived with a small anxiety attached, because a gift you are responsible for keeping is not entirely a gift.

That has been heavy. It has been heavy for years, and you have carried it as though it were ordinary.

It was never true. The written word says He is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless, and the Spirit of God is named as the one who seals a person, which is a word about a thing being held shut from the outside, not a thing straining to stay shut from within.

You are not the weak link. There is no weak link. The block is two tons and it has been down there since before you were born.

Let me guard this so it does not go wrong.

The lines are not sinful. A spring line is good seamanship, and a practice on a Monday morning is a good practice. Nobody is telling you to stop praying or to let a week go slack.

The question is what you believe they are doing. If you believe they are holding the boat, you will keep adding them, because the anxiety that put on the ninth will always argue for a tenth. If you know the block is holding the boat, you will still tie her up properly, and you will sleep through the blow.

Same rope. Same knot. Entirely different night.

There was a man five hundred years ago who added lines his whole early life, and who wrote afterward that he had been trying to hold on to God with hands that were the least reliable thing in the arrangement. What freed him was learning which end of the rope God was holding. He did not become a careless sailor. He became a man who could sleep in a storm.