The Morning On The Water

It was about twenty past five in the morning and he was on his own.

He is on his own most mornings. That is not the unusual part. He has been going out at that hour for most of his adult life and there is nothing remarkable in any of it, and he is not a man who is looking for something to happen.

Eleven years ago something happened.

He has never described it. Not to his wife, who he tells almost everything. Not to his brother. Not to the man he goes out with sometimes, who he trusts with a great deal.

And it is not fear that has stopped him, which is what people usually assume. He is not afraid of being laughed at, and he would be quite untroubled if somebody did.

It is something much odder, and he has thought about it for eleven years and this is the closest he has got.

He is afraid that describing it will make it smaller.

Because he knows exactly what will happen if he puts it into sentences. The sentences will be ordinary. They will be about weather and light and a particular quality in the air, because those are the only words there are, and the person listening will nod, and it will sound like a nice morning.

And it was not a nice morning.

So he has kept it whole by keeping it wordless, and for eleven years that has felt like the right decision, and only lately has it started to feel like something else, which he cannot name either.

So let me ask you.

What did you turn aside to look at, and who have you never told?

Everything came out of a man deciding to go and look

There is a morning on the far side of a desert with a man doing his ordinary work, which by then had been his ordinary work for forty years.

And there is a bush that is burning and not burning up, and here is what he says, out loud, to himself, before anything else happens at all.

So Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not burn up.Exodus 3:3

Read how ordinary that sentence is. A man talking to himself about going over to look. You are permitted to describe a thing badly, and the Holy Spirit is not made smaller by whatever words anybody finds for Him afterwards.

That is the hinge of the entire book. Not the bush. The sentence.

Because the next verse says something that is easy to read past: When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush.

The calling came after the turning.

The bush had presumably been burning for a while. Moses had a flock to attend to and a job to do and forty years of not having had anything unusual happen to him, and he could have registered it, decided it was a trick of the light, and gone on with the sheep.

He turned aside. And the record says that God spoke when He saw him turn.

Hear where you stand, eleven years on from a morning on the water.

You are not a man who imagined something in good light. Scripture puts the whole deliverance of a nation downstream of one man saying I will go over and see, and the Spirit has never once required a thing to be explainable in order to have been real.

And now let me speak to your actual fear, which is not the ordinary one and deserves an answer of its own.

You are afraid that words will shrink it.

They will. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because you would know I was lying. Any sentence you make about that morning will be smaller than that morning, and the person listening will hear a description of some weather, and there is no set of words that will do it.

But notice what you have concluded from that, and notice that it does not follow.

You have concluded that the shrunken version replaces the real one. It does not. Moses told that story for the rest of his life, and it is in a book, in about four verses, in the flattest possible language, and it did not stop being what it was.

The word says he turned aside to look and God called to him from the bush, and the account we have of it is a few lines long, and every one of those lines is smaller than the morning it describes.

The description is not the thing. It never was. And a thing that has never been described has not been kept whole; it has been kept alone, and those are different.

So you are not a man who imagined something in good light. Exodus 3 says Moses turned aside to see and that God called to him when He saw him turn, and the Spirit never once required a thing to be explainable in order to have been real.