The Island Is Still There

Ailsa walked out to the point on the Tuesday and the island was gone.

She has walked that path perhaps nine hundred times. From the gate it is twenty-two minutes if you do not stop, and at the point there is a bench with a plaque on it for somebody she did not know, and from that bench, on any ordinary day, you can see the island.

Not a smudge on the horizon. The island. Two miles out, with the shape of it clear enough to see where the old jetty was and the white house that has not had anybody in it since before she was born.

That Tuesday it was fog.

Not dramatic weather. No wind, no rain, nothing to photograph. The particular flat gray that comes in off that water about eleven times a year and sits there, and the world stops at about forty feet in every direction.

She sat on the bench anyway.

And what she found, sitting there, was that she could not make herself believe in the island.

She knew it. Obviously she knew it. She could have drawn it. She had been out there twice as a girl and once with her husband before he got ill. There is not a person alive who could have argued her out of the island as a matter of fact.

She simply could not feel it, and after a while she noticed that the not feeling it was making the knowing seem thin.

That is the bit she went home thinking about, because that is the bit that was not about an island.

Because her faith has been like that since about the autumn.

Nothing has broken. That is what she cannot explain to anybody. There was no crisis, no argument, no terrible thing. She can still say every word of it and mean it. She could give you reasons, good ones, and she has not stopped going and she has not stopped praying.

It has simply gone gray. And the greyness has begun to make the knowing seem thin, and she has started to wonder, in a quiet unhurried way that frightens her more than a crisis would, whether she has been sitting on a bench looking at nothing for a very long time.

Rab was coiling rope at the slip when she came back down.

He is not a man who talks and she was not going to say anything, and then she did, and it came out as: "Cannot see the island."

And he said, without looking up, "It is there."

And she said, "I know it is there."

And he said, "Aye. Knowing it and seeing it are two different jobs, and only one of them is yours today."

The dark is not dark to Him

Psalm 139 has a line in it that people quote for comfort and rarely notice is a claim about physics.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night," even the darkness is not dark to You, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You.Psalm 139:11 to 12

Look at what David is actually saying, because it is precise.

He is not saying the darkness is not real. He begins by saying it plainly: surely the darkness will overwhelm me. That is his honest report and Scripture keeps it.

What he says is that darkness is a fact about the observer and not a fact about the room.

Darkness and light are alike to You. The fog is in your eyes. It is not in Him. He is not sitting in a dim version of Himself waiting for the weather to clear. The visibility has changed and He has not.

So hear this said over you, on the bench with the flat gray out to forty feet. You are looking at a God who is exactly as present as He was in the summer, and the change is in the air between you and not in Him. That is written down in the Psalms, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as bearing witness with our spirit, which is a work going on underneath the level where you take your own readings.

Now let me name the specific fear, because it is not the fog.

It is that the fog is telling you the truth.

That the warm years were the illusion and this flat gray is the actual state of things, and that what you have been calling faith was a feeling you had, which has now worn off, leaving the real position exposed.

That is the fear, and it is worth saying out loud because it loses about half its weight when it is said.

And here is the answer to it. You did not see the island because you felt warm. You saw the island because it was there, on nine hundred days, in all weathers, and the two miles between you and it did not shorten on the clear days.

Faith is not the feeling of the island. It is the island.

Let me say the second thing, and it is the one this whole site turns on.

God does His most decisive work in the place where nothing about Him is visible. At a cross, in the dark, with no answer to the cry and every observable fact pointing the same way: He is not here, this has failed, there is nothing to see.

That was the hour He saved the world.

So a gray season is not a special problem He has no category for. It is the exact terrain He is most often working in, and it is the terrain He chose for the most important thing He ever did. That is written, and the Spirit of God is at work in a flat autumn the same way He was at work in the summer, and He is under no obligation to make that visible to you on any given Tuesday.

And your job today is the smaller of the two.

Not to see it. To know it, and to sit on the bench anyway, and to come back down the path and get on with the afternoon. Rab is right, and nine hundred walks are not nothing, and the fog lifts on that coast about as reliably as it comes in.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that faith is a matter of holding to what God has said in the exact hour when everything visible says the opposite, and that anybody who only believes when the weather is clear has not yet been asked to believe anything.