The Road Is Gone

You can hear water where there did not use to be water. That is the thing that unsettles people most when they come and look, and everybody has come and looked.

Forty yards of hillside sat down in the rain in the second week of the month and took the road with it, and what is there now is a raw brown face of earth and a lot of new stone and a stream that has decided on a different route.

There is no other road. That is not dramatic, it is geography. There is a track that four wheel drives could do in the dry, which it has not been, and a boat that is entirely dependent on a swell that has been up for a fortnight.

He goes up twice a week to the place where the tarmac ends now. He stands there. He has stopped bringing anybody.

What is on the other side is not his house or his family. It is the thing he does. Twice a week for eleven years, and it is not a job and there is nobody to tell about it, and there are people on that side who do not have anybody else showing up.

The engineers came and did their work properly and the word that came back was that the whole face has to be stabilized first and that no date can be given.

The sentence stands there with him. Not I am cut off. It is: there are people on the other side of that and I cannot get to them, and nobody can tell me when.

You know that hillside. It might be a road, or a border, or a body that will not travel, or a rule that came in overnight. Something that nobody can be blamed for has put you on the wrong side of the thing you were for, and there is no date, and the no date is worse than a long wait.

What they were told to do at the water

There is a moment where a whole nation stands at the edge of water they cannot cross with an army behind them, and the instruction they are given is the strangest one in the Bible.

The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.Exodus 14:14

That is the entire assignment. Hold your peace. Not push. Not find a route. Not organize. The sea did open, and it opened later in the chapter and by a means nobody there had thought of, and the sentence spoken to the people while they were still looking at unbroken water was that they were not the ones fighting.

Read the position they were in. There was no way through, no way round, and no time. That is the exact geography of a hillside with forty yards missing out of it.

You are on the near side of an impossible thing and the fighting has never once been assigned to you. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man at the end of some tarmac, and the Holy Spirit who has gone up that road with you for eleven years is the evidence that the work on the other side was never running on your vehicle.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic where the tarmac stops. If the fighting is His, then forty yards of hillside is information about rain, and geology, and an engineer being careful with people's lives. It is not the end of what you are for, and it never had the standing to become that.

What is on the other side is not left to nobody

Here is the second thing, and it is the part that actually keeps you awake.

It is not the inconvenience. It is a list of specific people, and you could say all their names, and what has been running for six weeks is a picture of each of them with nobody arriving.

But look at what that picture assumes: that between those people and God there was one road, one man, and one vehicle, and that when the hillside came down heaven had no other approach.

You do not believe that about anybody else's absence. You have never once believed it about a colleague who was ill.

You have been carried through every one of these six weeks, and so has every person on the other side, and none of it depended on tarmac. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work over there rather than waiting at a landslip for a road to be stabilized.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to find the track, or to risk the boat, or to organize something. And nothing here will name a month for that road, because nobody can, and a promise about a date is not one anybody was authorized to make.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought at the edge of a slip. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not stood with, twice a week, in silence. And the thing in the way is not the hillside and it is not the engineers, who are right. It is a sentence: there are people over there and I cannot get to them. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority standing where the road stops. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much you have shown up in the past.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than helplessness, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.