The Tide Does Not Give Reasons

He goes down at half past five, before the harbor wakes up, because between half past five and about seven there is nobody there to be kind to him.

His boy drowned in November. Twenty two years old. He was a strong swimmer and he was a careful one and none of that is any use as a sentence.

The harbor has been good to him. That is what makes this hard to say. Nobody has been cold and nobody has avoided him and the whole town turned out in the rain.

But every man on that dock has a reason now.

The pastor said the ocean is God's and everything in it and the Lord gives and takes away. The coach, who loved that boy and cried at the service, said he went doing what he loved. The old fellow who runs the fuel dock said the sea takes what it wants and always has, and he said it the way you say something you have said all your life.

And his sister, on the phone from the mainland, said everything has a purpose, and he had to put the phone down on the counter and walk out of the room.

Every one of them meant it. Not one of them was trying to hurt him. And all of them together have made the dock a place he can only stand to be on when it is empty.

So he goes at half past five. He sits on the wall with the coffee, and the water is flat, and the boats knock against their fenders, and nobody says anything to him at all, and it is the only hour of the day he can breathe in.

He has started to think there is something wrong with him. A man who cannot take comfort from good people has gone hard somewhere, is what he thinks, at about four in the morning, when he is awake anyway.

If that is a wall anybody has sat on, stay here. There is a psalm that is going to take that four in the morning idea apart.

There is a psalm that ends in the dark

I want to put something in front of you that most people have never been shown, because it changes what a man is allowed to feel.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18

That is the last line of Psalm 88. Not the middle. The last line. The psalm ends there, on that word, and nothing comes after it.

Every other lament in that book turns somewhere. There is a but, or a yet, or a nevertheless, and the singer climbs back up. Psalm 88 does not. It goes down and it stays down and the song stops in the dark.

And it was kept. It was copied and preserved and handed to the worship leader with a tune name on it and sung in public by the congregation of Israel, on purpose, for a thousand years.

You are held inside a faith that made room for that psalm, and you were never expected to end on a nevertheless. Psalm 88 is the written word refusing to tidy a man's darkness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the song survived without an ending glued on.

That is what to do with the four in the morning idea. A man who cannot climb back up by November's end is not a hard man. He is a man standing exactly where a psalm stands, and the psalm is in the book.

You have Scripture's own permission to be where you are, and you were never asked to produce a turn you have not been given. Psalm 88:18 is in the canon precisely as it stands, and the Spirit who inspired it is not embarrassed by a harbor wall at half past five.

The sea did not decide anything

Now the sentence from the fuel dock, because that one is doing more damage than the others and I want to get it out of the water.

The sea takes what it wants. He has said it for fifty years and he does not mean it as theology; it is the way a working man talks about weather.

But it lands on a father like a verdict, and the verdict is that the ocean is a power with an appetite that chose his son. And that idea will follow a man down to the wall every morning and sit next to him.

The ocean is not an agent. It is not a mind, it does not want, it does not select, it has no will and it has never once made a decision about anybody's child. Scripture is plain about that from the first page: the water is made, not sovereign. It is a made thing, in the hands of the One who made it, and the one time it appears in the Gospels as anything other than water it is being told to be quiet by a carpenter, and it obeys.

You are not up against a hungry sea, and you were never in a contest with the water. The written word puts the ocean under His hand rather than over yours, and the Spirit who moved on the face of the deep on the first page has not handed it any authority since.

That does not tell you why. I am not going to give you why; nobody on that dock has it and neither do I. But it takes one wrong weight off the wall, and that one has been heavy.

Why the whole dock reached for something

I am not going to leave you angry at those men, because you have to work alongside them and it would cost you more than it costs them.

Here is what happens on a dock. A man walks up on another man whose son has drowned. Everything about that is unbearable. He has fifteen seconds, he cannot fix it, and standing there with empty hands is more exposure than most men can take.

So a sentence comes out. It is not aimed at you and it is not a judgment on your boy. It is what a frightened man reaches for when he has nothing else in his hands, the way you would reach for a line in a swell.

Keep the pastor. Keep the coach. Keep the old fellow at the fuel dock, and keep your sister, who is a thousand miles away and could not do a single thing about it. And take their sentences and leave them on the water.

Right now, as you read this, you are accompanied by a God who has never once needed the loss made smaller before He would come near it. Psalm 88 was preserved without an ending, and His Spirit has been sitting on that wall at half past five every morning since November.