The Only Boat Close Enough

The sandbar comes up out of the water an hour either side of low tide and goes back under without any announcement.

He is eleven. He walked out on it in bare feet to look at something a long way from shore, a shape in the sand that turned out to be a ray print, and he stayed with it the way an eleven year old stays with a thing. When he looked up, the channel he had crossed on wet ankles had filled and was moving, and it was moving the way water moves when it means it.

He is not in danger of anything yet. He is on a firm bar of sand with maybe forty minutes of it left. What he is, is separated, by a strip of green water forty feet across that is now running at the speed of a person walking fast.

Here is the bay. There are nine boats out in it and every one of them has seen him. The radio is going. A yacht has come about and is standing off the outer mark with her sails slack because she draws six feet and the flats between her and the bar are two. A dive boat is lifting her anchor. There is a big shining launch a mile out doing eighteen knots in the wrong direction because the man at the wheel has not looked at his chart plotter. Somebody on the beach is running toward the lifeboat station. Every single one of these people wants that boy off that bar and every single one of them is going to be too late or too deep, and the ones with the training are the furthest away of all.

And there is one small open boat with a short outboard tilted half up, forty yards off the near side of the channel, with a man in her checking pots he has no business checking at this state of the tide. He draws about eleven inches. He is the only vessel in the bay who can be alongside that sandbar in ninety seconds, and he is not a rescuer, he is not qualified, he has no radio and no orange stripe on his hull. He is simply the one who is near.

He does not make an announcement about it. He drops the pot line, swings her round, and comes.

Now hold that whole bay in your head, because you have been living in it.

You know the willing ones. People who love you have said tell me if there is anything I can do, and they meant it with their whole chest, and there is nothing they can do, because the thing you are standing on is a bar of sand in a place they cannot get to. You have watched people who care about you stand off in deep water with their sails slack. And somewhere in the last few years you stopped putting it on the radio at all, because the answer was always the same shape: willing, and too far out.

So you have arrived at a quiet, reasonable, terrible conclusion. Not that nobody cares. You are past that. It is that caring is not the missing piece. The missing piece is somebody with the right draft for your particular water, and there is no such person, and the tide is doing what the tide does.

Two things, and a redeemer has both

Scripture has a word for the man in the small boat, and it is older than boats.

In the law of Israel, when a person lost their ground or their freedom, the one who could get it back for them was not the kindest person available and not the most capable. It was the near kinsman. The one whose blood put him within reach of the case. He had the right of redemption because of who he already was to that person, and nobody outside that nearness could exercise it however much they wanted to.

So a redeemer is two things at once, and both of them have to be true in the same person. He has to be near enough to have the right. He has to be willing enough to use it. Take away the first and you have sympathy, which is nine boats standing off in deep water. Take away the second and you have a locked door with the correct key hanging beside it. The world is full of both, and this is exactly why you are tired.

Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, those he redeemed from the hand of the foe.Psalm 107:2

You have a Redeemer with both, and He is not standing off in deep water. That is not my encouragement talking. Scripture says the redeemed of the Lord were redeemed from the hand of the foe, which is a hand you cannot reach past yourself, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it in the water you are actually standing in tonight.

Look at what He did about the nearness, because this is the whole hinge. He did not shout instructions across the channel. He came into the shallow water. He took flesh and stood in the same tide, in a body that got tired and thirsty and cold, and by doing it He put Himself within the right of a kinsman, which is a thing no amount of power on its own could have done. Job said it centuries early and said it from the ash heap: I know that my Redeemer lives.

You are held by somebody near, and the nearness was His idea before it was your need. I am not asking you to feel near to Him. The word says He came and stood in the same water, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a doctrine about the incarnation land as a boat in your own bay.

The water is real, and the verdict is not the water

Now the honest half, because this site does not tidy things and I am not going to start.

He does not tell that boy there was never a channel. There was. It filled, it ran fast, and he really was cut off, and pretending otherwise would insult him. What changes is not the water. What changes is who is in it with him.

Say it plainly with me. The record stands and the verdict is changed. Whatever your bay actually holds, it happened and it is happening, and God is not proposing to rewrite the chart. The years you spent out there are on the chart too. What He is doing is not erasing the strip of green water. He is coming across it, in a boat with the right draft, and the verdict over you afterward is settled by who came, not by how far out you got.

You are not too particular a case, and there is no water in your life too shallow for Him. His word says He redeemed His people from the hand of the foe, and the Holy Spirit is the one who insists on the word redeemed rather than the word encouraged, because those are two different verbs and only one of them gets a boy off a bar of sand.

And notice what the verse asks of the redeemed. Say so. Not earn it, not prove it, not qualify for it. Say so. There is a reason a man who has been separated goes quiet, and there is a reason the first instruction to a redeemed person is to open his mouth.

You have been given something to say, and the saying is not a fee for anything. Scripture puts the redeeming first and the saying second, in that order and never the other way round, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a mouth from turning a response into a payment.