Two Winters On The Trailer

The tarp has gone green on the north side. That is the detail he notices this morning, coffee in hand, standing in his own yard at ten past six with nowhere in particular to be.

Green on the north side means two winters. Not one. One winter and it stays gray.

Underneath it is a hull he sanded himself. Underneath it is a good boat, and a plan he used to describe to people in a lot of detail: the boys, weekends, the run out past the point, teaching them the same way he was taught. He could talk for an hour about that plan. He did, in fact, talk about it for an hour on a night he still remembers, to a room of people who were glad for him.

What happened was not dramatic. His shoulder, then the hours at work going up when they were meant to be going down, then the year his mother needed everything, then a second winter that arrived before he had noticed the first one leave.

Nobody asks him about the boat now. That is the thing that changed most recently and it changed silently. There was a period when people asked and he said soon, and there was a period when people asked and he changed the subject, and now there is this period, where the boat is a shape in a yard and everyone has kindly agreed not to see it.

And the sentence that arrives with the coffee is not I should get on with that. It is quieter and much worse: I used to be a man who was going to do things.

You know that sentence. It may be a boat, or a room you were going to convert, or a plan you described to somebody once with your whole face lit up. The object varies and the silence around it does not, and the silence has been telling you something about yourself that you have never once said out loud.

The plan went quiet. The purpose did not.

I want to set two things beside each other in that yard, because they have been stacked one on top of the other for two winters.

The plan stopped. That is honest. The boat did not go out, the boys are two years older, and one of them is at an age now where a weekend with his father is a different kind of negotiation. That is a real loss and I am not going to sand it smooth.

The purpose of God did not stop, and it was never the same object as your plan. That is the whole of this and I am putting it first, in the yard, before the coffee goes cold. What cannot be stopped is His purpose. Not your shoulder, not your hours, not the two winters, not the tarp.

For the LORD of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it? and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?Isaiah 14:27

Those are two questions with no answer, and that is the point of them. The prophet is not asking who might be strong enough. He is saying, out loud, in front of an empire, that the list of things capable of turning back the hand of God is empty. Not short. Empty. And nobody has ever added a shoulder injury, a set of shifts, or a green tarp to it.

You are inside a purpose that has never been disannulled by anything, standing in a yard with a cold coffee, and it did not pause for either of those winters. That is the written word's claim and not my encouragement borrowing its clothes, and the Holy Spirit who has been at work in you through both of them is the evidence that nothing was ever waiting on your calendar.

See what that does to the reckoning you have been doing at six in the morning. If the thing that keeps moving is His, then a boat under a tarp is information about a boat. It is not information about a man, and it never had the right to become that.

Nobody handed you the engine

Here is the second thing, and it lifts rather than adds.

Somewhere in the last two years you began to believe that a purpose of God moves at the speed you move. So when you slowed, it slowed, and when you went quiet, it went quiet, and the green on the north side of that tarp has been reading to you like a report card. But you were not the engine of it. You are inside it, the way a man is inside a tide, and a man who believes he is making the tide will read every still morning as his own failure.

You have been carried through both winters, and the carrying did not slow down on the days you did nothing anybody could see. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than sitting in the yard waiting for the tarp to come off.

There is something else worth saying flat out, because this is exactly where this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to get the boat in the water. Not this summer, not ever. If that hull sits on that trailer until somebody else tows it away you have not stepped one inch outside the purpose of God, because getting inside it was never a thing you did by launching anything and staying inside it is not a thing you keep up by finishing projects.

And this is where your mouth comes in, because I am not leaving you with a nice thought to carry back into the kitchen. 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 thought about while the coffee cools. And the thing in the way is not the shoulder and it is not the hours. It is a sentence: I used to be a man who was going to do things. That sentence has been running your mornings unopposed for two years because nobody has answered it out loud, least of all you.

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 at ten past six in a yard. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how convincing you sounded.

If those two winters have taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, and there are mornings you would rather not get up 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.