The Boat He Gets Into

"Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land." (Luke 5:3)

Jesus needed a boat. The crowd was pressing in to hear the word of God, and he stood at the water's edge with nowhere to stand, and there were two boats at the shore, and the fishermen had gotten out and were washing their nets after a long and completely fruitless night. And Jesus got into Simon's boat. He did not ask if Simon was ready. He did not ask if Simon believed, or whether it had been a good night. He got in, asked him to push out a little from shore, sat down, and taught the crowds from it. Simon's boat became a pulpit, and Simon, who had caught nothing and was exhausted and had asked for none of this, sat in his own boat and listened.

So here is the question to sit with. What do you have that he could use? Not what you wish you had, not the thing you would offer him if you were further along and more impressive. The thing that is actually sitting there, the ordinary equipment of your ordinary life, the very thing you are exhausted from using badly, that produced nothing at all this week.

He does not wait for you to be ready before he climbs in. He gets into the boat you already have, in the condition it is in, and makes it the place from which he speaks. Stop apologizing for the smallness of what you carry. He is standing on the shore of it right now, asking to get in.

The One Thing You Cannot See

"Search me, O God, and know my heart." (Psalm 139:23)

There is a truth most of us would rather not write down. If you stay in the work of love long enough, you will not only be the one who was wounded. You will be the one who did the wounding. You will say the thing that lands wrong and lands hard. You will be tired and short with somebody who came to you at the worst possible moment for you and the most important moment for them. You will misjudge. You will defend yourself when you should have listened. You will protect your reputation at someone's expense and tell yourself it was for the good of the church.

And you will do it while genuinely believing you are one of the good ones. That is the part that should frighten us most. Not that we might fail, but that we might fail and never know. The wounds we inflict are almost always invisible to us, because we are standing inside our own good intentions, and intentions make a poor mirror.

Which is why the only prayer that actually makes a person safer is the one that hands the search over. Search me. Know my heart. Tell me what is in there. You will not find it on your own, because you are the one thing you cannot see. Do not pray only to be delivered from the people who wound you. Pray to be shown the places where you are the one doing it, and then thank God when he shows you, because a wound you can finally see is a wound you can finally stop inflicting.

At the Proper Time

"For in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)

There is a promise buried in that verse, and it comes with a condition, and the condition is not what you would expect. It is not if you do it well. It is not if you do it with joy, or without complaining, or with your heart in the right place the whole time. The condition is if you do not give up. That is the entire requirement. Do not quit.

You are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to be doing good with a heart that feels like a stone. You are allowed to have lost the fire and be running on nothing but habit and stubbornness and a promise you can barely remember believing. At the proper time you will reap. Not at your time, at the proper one, which is God's, and which is almost never the season we would have picked. That gap is exactly where most people put the shovel down, four inches from the water, certain nothing is there because nothing has come yet.

The harvest is not a reward for enthusiasm. It is a reward for still being there. So measure yourself, on the hard days, by the only measure the verse gives. Not by how you feel about the work, not by what you can see coming up out of the ground, but by whether you are still in the field. Stay in the field. The proper time is God's to name, and he has never once been late to a harvest he promised.

The Things We Say to Ourselves

"Let us not grow weary." (Galatians 6:9)

Have these ever crossed your mind. I do not know if I have what it takes. This is too hard. Life feels like it is caving in on me. I am losing ground, losing my footing. I am not sure I am the one Jesus picked for this. I have messed up too many times. I do not want to wait anymore. There are too many obstacles in front of me. They have more than I have, better resources, more support, an easier road. Everyone and everything is against me.

That is not a list built to scold anyone. Nearly every honest believer has said most of those sentences to himself, some of them this year, and the reason we do not say them out loud is that we assume everyone else is doing fine. They are not. The person beside you on Sunday is running the same tape, and both of you are certain you are the only one.

The Bible is full of weariness, and it is not embarrassed by it. Elijah asked to die under a tree. Jeremiah cursed the day he was born. David asked how long, again and again, and God kept the words in the songbook on purpose. The Scriptures never once shame a weary person for being weary. The only thing they ask is that you do not lie down permanently. Being exhausted is not a failure of faith. Staying down, and calling the ground your home, is the only thing to guard against. Say the sentence if you must. Then get up.

Surrounded by Water

"Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9)

Picture two boys who ride their bikes to the pool on the hottest day of the summer, up and down the hills, without one thought of bringing water. They swim for hours in an enormous hole of clean cold water, and it never once occurs to them that they will need something to drink for the ride home. And on the way back they nearly collapse. They end up cutting into a farm, finding a black hose lying in the sludge of a cattle barn, and drinking from it like they are drowning, and swearing it is the best water they have ever tasted.

Here is the thing to notice. They were surrounded by water for four hours. They simply never thought to drink any of it.

That is most of us in the work of doing good. We are near the source constantly, close enough to touch it, and we go weary anyway, because being near water is not the same as drinking it. You can spend all day handling the things of God and end the day parched, because proximity is not the same as intake. Weariness is not proof that the well is dry. Often it is proof that you have been standing in the water without once bending to drink. So before you decide you have nothing left to give, ask the simpler question. When did you last actually drink from the source you have been standing in all along?

The Two Options We Know

"Cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you." (1 Peter 5:7)

Most of us have learned only two things to do with fear. The first is to control it. We manage the variables, build the systems, save more, plan harder, hover, check the locks twice, and call it wisdom. Some of it is. But past a certain point it stops being wisdom and becomes a small private religion whose god is ourselves, and it is exhausting, and it does not work. The second is to numb it. Not only the obvious things; numbing is anything you reach for to make the feeling stop without making the reason stop. A screen. A drink. A schedule so full the two a.m. voice cannot get a word in. Busyness is the most respectable anesthetic in the church, and we hand out awards for it.

Control or numb. That is the whole menu, and most of us have been ordering off it our entire lives. But there is a third thing, and it is neither fixing the fear nor silencing it. It is bringing the fear with you. Casting your anxiety on him is not the same as resolving it before you come, and it is not the same as drugging it into quiet. It is carrying the thing, still alive and still shaking, straight to the One who cares for you, and setting it down in front of him unfinished. Stop trying to master it, and stop trying to mute it. Bring it. That is the option no one put on the menu, and it is the only one that leads anywhere.

Fear Is Honest

"What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee." (Psalm 56:3)

What are you afraid of right now? Not in a general way. Right now, this week, the thing that shows up at two in the morning when the house is quiet and the mind will not stop. For some it is a marriage, not an explosion but a drift, two people in the same house feeling a hundred miles apart and neither of them saying so. For some it is a child walking toward something they cannot be stopped from reaching. For some it is money, and they know exactly what is in the account, and it is not enough. For some it is a diagnosis, theirs or someone they love, and the ground moved and has not settled since. And for some it does not even have a name; it is just a weight, a hum, a tiredness that sleep does not fix.

None of this is said from above anyone. It is the common air of being human, and the pastor breathes it too. But here is the thing worth turning over. Fear is more honest than we give it credit for. Fear shows you what you have been leaning on. It is not merely an affliction to be silenced; it is information about the foundation. So before you rush to make the fear go quiet, let it finish its sentence. It is about to tell you, more truthfully than you would ever tell yourself, where you have actually been resting the weight of your life.

The Question That Will Not Leave

"Let us not grow weary of doing good." (Galatians 6:9)

How do we sustain compassion over time? That is the question that will not leave, and it should not be made to leave. We are losing people, not to scandal, not to doubt, not to some clever argument read online. We are losing them to exhaustion. To wounds that pile up without healing. To the slow, private discovery that the thing they thought they could carry for a lifetime turned out to be unbearable after four years.

This is not written from the far side of anything. There are mornings a faithful person cannot get out of bed. There are Sundays a preacher stands in a pulpit saying words he does not feel. There are whole seasons in which someone is drowning and not one person around them can see it. If that is you, you are not the exception to the people of God. You are closer to the center of them than you think.

And here is the honest hope. It is possible to keep loving people for forty years and still be a person at the end of it. But not the way we have often been doing it, alone, unwatered, pretending the cost is not real. The sustaining does not come from gritting harder. It comes from a different economy altogether, one where the strength is drawn and not manufactured. Do not ask how to grind on longer. Ask where the life is supposed to come from, because the way most of us have been doing it was never going to last, and was never meant to.

Harassed and Helpless

"Because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." (Matthew 9:36)

Two words, and they are doing enormous work. Harassed. That is not tired. It is a word for something done to you, over and over, by a force outside you. It describes a person being worn down by a pressure they did not invent and cannot stop. Helpless. That is not weak. It is the word for someone who has run out of moves.

And Jesus looks at a crowd of religious people, people with a temple and a law and a priesthood and centuries of Scripture, and he does not see rebels. He sees sheep with no one watching them. That ought to change how you look at the person who is driving you to distraction right now. The difficult one. The defensive one. The one who keeps making the same catastrophic decision.

They are not opposing you. They are unshepherded. There is a very great difference between those two things, and everything you do next depends on which one you believe. Treat a harassed and helpless person as an enemy and you will fight them. See them as a sheep with no shepherd and you will do the thing Jesus did, which is move toward them with compassion instead of away from them with a verdict. Ask, of the person who most exasperates you, not how to win against them, but who has been shepherding them, and whether the answer is no one at all.

A Psalm for It

"As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God." (Psalm 42:1)

As the deer pants for the water, so the soul pants for God. That is not a psalm of arrival. It is a psalm of thirst. The man writing it is not describing a full cup but a dry mouth, and he is describing it while remembering how things used to be, how he once went up to the house of God with the sound of a festival crowd. He is not there anymore.

And then, twice, he turns and speaks directly to his own soul. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God. He is arguing with himself, out loud, on paper, in a hymn we have kept for three thousand years.

That is the whole reason the Psalter exists. There is a psalm for every condition a person will ever be in. The rage and the doubt, the guilt and the exhaustion, even the morning you did not want to be alive, it is all in there, and it is all in there on purpose. God saw to it that when you walked in on the worst day of your life, you would find that someone had already stood exactly where you are standing, and had left a flower for you to find. So do not face the dry season wordless. Go into the garden, find the psalm planted for your thirst, and let a man three thousand years dead teach your soul how to talk to itself again.

No Third Category

"Death and life are in the power of the tongue." (Proverbs 18:21)

We have to become mindful of what our words are doing to people, because they are doing something, always, whether we intended it or not. We can use words to speak life. We can use words to speak death. There is no third category. There is no neutral. There is only what is happening in another person's chest after you have stopped talking, and you do not control it, and you cannot take it back, and very often you will never even find out.

And here is a question worth not putting down. If Jesus is truly in us, would not our words also speak Jesus out of us? Take it not as a flourish but as a test. If the Spirit of the living God has taken up residence in a person, and if what fills a heart is what finally comes out of the mouth, then the things you say when you are tired, and the things you say when you are angry, and the things you say in a low voice about someone who is not there, are all telling you something true about what is actually in you.

Not what you hope is in you. What is in you. The mouth is the most honest instrument you own. It reports the true contents of the heart, especially when you have stopped guarding it.

Most of us do not always like what our mouth reports. But the answer is not to argue with the report. It is to let it drive us back to the only One who can change what is in the well, so that what comes up out of it is life. Ask him to fill the heart with himself, and then listen this week to what your words reveal is really there.

The No That Love Says

"Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe." (Proverbs 29:25)

Do you have trouble saying no? There is a particular powerlessness in it, where the word is right there in your mouth and simply will not come, and you hear yourself agreeing to the thing even as your heart sinks. Somebody asks, and you say yes, and you are already tired. And it always traces back to the same fear. What would they think of me if I said no.

So we end up buying whatever anyone is selling. We say yes to the errand, the committee, the favor, the fourteenth thing this month, and we do it because we would rather be exhausted than disliked, and then we tell ourselves that this is what love looks like. But love is not the same thing as the inability to refuse.

Consider that God says no to us all the time. He says it often and plainly, even to things we wanted badly, even to things we were sure were good. Does that mean he does not love us? We know it does not. God is love, and sometimes love is precisely the thing that says no. No to what would harm you. No to what would hollow you out. A no is not the absence of love. A no can be the shape love takes when it sees further down the road than you can.

Which means your endless yes may not be kindness at all. It may be fear wearing the costume of kindness. So before you answer the next request, ask what is actually moving you. If even God, who is love, can say no in love, then you are permitted to, and the fear that would not let the word out was never love to begin with.

The Only Two Masters

"Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? ... If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." (Galatians 1:10)

In the middle of an argument about grace and performance, Paul stops and asks a question that has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the heart. Whose approval am I working for. And he does not leave it hanging. He lays down two options and makes them plain, and in the end they are the only two there are. You will be a servant of God, or you will be a slave to the opinions of other people.

Notice that both of those words put your life in someone else's hand. Neither one is independence. There is no third door where you finally become self-sufficient and beholden to no one, because that person has never existed. You were made to be held. The only question is by whom.

It is a harder choice than it is usually made to sound. Long before Christ ever broke into the hardness of the heart and began to warm it, most of us had already spent years living for the approval of others. It is the water we learned to swim in, the first language we ever spoke. It is entirely possible to go on today and tomorrow and every day after, calculating what the room thinks, managing how we are seen, keeping our standing carefully in repair, and to call the whole exhausting business faithfulness.

Paul says that if he were still doing that, he would not be a servant of Christ. Not a worse servant. Not one at all. Let that sentence cost you something, and then choose your master on purpose, before the room chooses for you.