Standing With the Family at the Shore

The message came through the family, not from them, which is how these things arrive.

A cousin of a cousin. They are doing something at the shore on Saturday morning for a man who drowned last month, and the family have asked around for people who will come and stand, and somebody gave them his name, and would he.

He read it three times on his phone in the truck.

He has been to that stretch of shore probably eighty times. He learned to swim there. That is not the problem.

The problem is Kailani.

Two years in September. His daughter. She was nineteen and it was not the water and it does not matter what it was, because the thing he carries around is not the manner of it, it is the fact of it, and two years has done nothing at all to the fact of it.

And now a family he does not know is going to walk out into the shallows on Saturday morning with flowers, and he has been asked to stand there with them, and he cannot work out whether he is the right man or the very worst one.

What he keeps coming back to is this. What have I got.

Because everybody else who goes on Saturday is going to have something. The uncle will have words. There will be somebody who prays well. There will be a woman who knows exactly how to put her arm around a person and how long to leave it there. He has watched those people work a shoreline and he has envied them his whole life.

And he has got nothing. He is a man who goes quiet. He was quiet through his own daughter's service and he has been quiet for two years and if he walks out into that water on Saturday he is going to stand there with wet legs and say nothing at all, and what use is that to anybody.

If anybody has read a message three times in a parked truck like that, stay with me. There is an anointing described in the sixty first chapter of Isaiah, and what it is for is not what most people think it is.

The anointing is to be with them, not to conclude them

Here is the passage the Lord Himself read out in Nazareth and then sat down.

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.Isaiah 61:1-2

Read the last clause again. To comfort all that mourn.

Not to explain to all that mourn. Not to conclude them, or to move them along, or to get them to a better place by the end of the morning. To comfort. To be with. The Hebrew word underneath it carries the sense of breathing out beside somebody, and that is what the anointing is for.

And notice the whole of it is His. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me. Nobody in that passage generates any of it. The one doing the comforting is carrying something that was put on him.

You are anointed for that shoreline rather than qualified for it, and you were carrying that same anointing through every silent month since September. Isaiah 61:1 is the written word putting the Spirit of the Lord God on the one who is sent, and that same Holy Spirit will be standing in the shallows on Saturday before a single person walks out.

Now the verse after it, and I want to be honest about this one, because it is the one people rush.

It says He will give them beauty for ashes and the oil of joy for mourning. That is a real promise and it belongs to God, and it is His to give in His own way and in His own timing, and it is not a thing anybody on this earth gets to promise anybody else on a Saturday morning. Nothing about that verse makes it a man's job to produce it in a family standing knee deep in water.

You are sent to comfort them and you were never sent to supply the oil of joy, and you were not the one who had to supply it in September either. Isaiah 61:3 has God Himself giving beauty for ashes and hands that job to nobody else, and the Holy Spirit has never once put the outcome of a morning on the man standing in the water.

The quiet man is not the one with nothing

Now let me deal with the arithmetic he has been doing in that truck, because it is wrong.

He thinks the ones with words are the ones with something.

Stand on that shore for a minute and look at it from the family. They will have had a month of words. A month of people with the right thing to say. And every one of those good sentences leaves the same faint impression behind it: that this is a thing that can be spoken to.

And then there is a man out there in the water who has not said anything.

That family will look at him at some point on Saturday. And what they will see is a man whose own is not finished. They will not know the details. They will not need to. There is a way a man stands in water at a memorial when he has been the one holding flowers himself, and every person on that shore who has ever been through it will recognize it inside of a second.

That is not nothing. That is the only thing on that beach that cannot be faked.

You are the one man in that half circle who cannot be mistaken for a visitor, and you were made unmistakable by two years you never asked for. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says the comfort received in trouble is what gets handed into any trouble, and the Spirit of God has not wasted one single month of what a father has carried.

Nothing on Saturday requires you to have got anywhere

Now let me take the last weight off, because I think it is the one holding him in the truck.

He is measuring himself against two years and finding a deficit. Two years, and he still goes quiet. Two years, and he still cannot be in a room when somebody says her name.

There is no ledger. Nowhere in the whole of Scripture is a mourner measured against the time behind them. Not one verse anywhere sets a rate. David wept for Absalom until Joab told him the army was ashamed, and God never once rebuked him for it. Jacob refused to be comforted and the text records it without a word of correction attached.

Two years is not a period he has failed to use properly. It is just two years, and they were hard, and he got through them.

And here is what that means for Saturday. He is not going down to that shore to demonstrate anything. Nobody is going to look at him and read his own progress off him. He is going to stand in the water with a family, and the fact that he is not finished is not a thing he has to hide out there, and it is not a thing he has to explain either.

You are welcome in that water in the exact state you are in, and you were welcome in it on every one of the eighty times you have been to that shore since. Genesis 37:35 has Jacob refusing to be comforted with no correction anywhere in the text, and the Holy Spirit does not grade a father against the calendar.