Two Boys And A Length Of Rope

The rope is about four feet of old line that has been through everything and that he keeps in a coffee tin on the porch with a couple of shackles and a knife he does not let them touch.

Two of them. Eleven and nine, and the nine year old is better and the eleven year old knows it and has decided to be gracious about it, which he finds funnier than he lets on.

Bowline. That is what they are on this week. The nine year old can do it and now does it fast to show off, and the eleven year old is doing the rabbit and the tree out loud under his breath and getting it wrong at exactly the same point every time.

He cannot go out any more. His heart, and a list of things attached to the heart, and a doctor who was clear in the way that leaves no room for negotiation.

Thirty-one years on the water. Most of a life on it.

Now: a porch, a coffee tin, four feet of line, and forty minutes on a Saturday if the boys turn up, which they do not always.

The sentence sits with him while the eleven year old gets it wrong again. Not I would rather be out there. It is: this is a fragment of a life being handed to children who will probably never use it.

You know that porch. It might be a rope, or a recipe, or a language, or a skill you had that has become forty minutes of teaching somebody young. You are handing over a piece of something that used to be the whole of you, and it looks, from where you sit, like a very small remainder.

A description, not a job

There is a sentence at the beginning of Acts that most people read as a commission and that is, if you read the grammar, something quieter and stronger.

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.Acts 1:8

Ye shall be witnesses. It is not phrased as an instruction. It is phrased as a fact about what they will be. And it comes attached to a source of power that is explicitly not theirs: after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.

Which means being a witness is not a role you take on and can therefore lose when your circumstances change. It is a description of what a person in Christ is, and the power in it comes from somewhere other than capacity.

You are a witness by description rather than by appointment, and the power in it has never once come out of what your body can do. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man on a porch, and the Holy Spirit who is named in that very verse is the evidence that Saturday mornings are not the remainder of anything.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic with the coffee tin. If witnessing is what you are and the power is His, then a heart and a list of conditions is information about a body after thirty-one years of hard work. It is not the size of what you are for, and it never had the standing to become that.

What is actually being handed over

Here is the second thing, and it is the part that goes unnoticed from too close up.

It looks like teaching knots. It is teaching knots, and the nine year old is genuinely good.

But sit on that porch as somebody walking past. What those two boys are receiving on a Saturday morning is forty minutes of an adult man's complete attention, patience with the same mistake at the same point four weeks running, and a thing done properly for its own sake with no purpose attached.

There is no chance whatever that they will remember this as a knot lesson.

You have been carried through every one of the years since the doctor was clear, and the carrying was never assessed against sea time. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work on that porch rather than measuring what is left of a working life.

And nothing here promises that those boys keep it up, or use it, or come back next Saturday. Two of the four last months they did not turn up and there was no reason given, because they are children.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a coffee tin. 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 sat with on a porch for years. And the thing in the way is not the heart and it is not the doctor, who was right. It is a sentence: this is a fragment being handed to children who will never use it. 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 holding four feet of old line. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the thirty-one years.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than loss, 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.