The Poles Do Not Move When the Water Does

The causeway runs out from the shore for a mile and a bit, and for most of every day it is a road, and for the rest of it there is no road there at all.

There is a line of poles down the whole length of it, driven into the rock, leaning slightly, worn pale on the seaward side. Halfway along there is a refuge box up on legs with a ladder, painted a green that has not been that green for a long while.

Two women walk out on it in the late afternoon. The older one has crossed it most weeks for forty years and does not look at the water. The younger one has done it perhaps a dozen times and looks at nothing else.

The tide table is pinned in the car park behind them and they read it before they set off, and they have the better part of two hours, and none of that is any help at all, because the sea out here does not come in the way a person expects. It does not arrive as a wall. It comes up through the sand from underneath, filling the low channels first, so that a stretch of ground that was dry when you looked at it is quietly not dry any more, off to your left, without a sound.

The younger woman's pace keeps creeping up. Oystercatchers going over, low and complaining. The smell of weed. Every few minutes she glances at the wet ground to the north and finds another silver thread in it that was not there.

She says, half laughing, that perhaps they ought to get on a bit.

The older woman does not change speed at all. She says the thing she has clearly said to a great many people on this stretch of sand: you cannot outwalk it, so there is no point starting.

Then she puts her hand out and rests it flat on the nearest pole as they pass it, the way you would touch a gatepost you had known all your life.

"These don't move," she says. "That's the whole trick. The water moves. The poles were set in the rock."

And by now you are the one walking beside her, because your ground has been filling with silver threads for two years and you have not said it out loud to anybody.

You have felt everything speed up. Not one event you could point at, just the whole of it, the way things are done, the ground under ordinary life shifting while you are still working out what happened last month. And underneath that, the thing that actually frightens you: the sense that your praying has become a slow, old, quiet activity in a world that is not slow, not old and not quiet, and that you are bringing a whispered sentence to something that is moving at a speed you cannot see the edges of.

You did not say any of that on the causeway. You just kept looking at the water.

Nobody is asking you to be fast

Let me start where it actually hurts, because I do not think the problem is information and I am not going to hand you any.

The ache is not that you do not understand what is changing. The ache is a feeling of being outpaced, and outpacing is a horrible feeling in a body. It puts a person into a low permanent brace, the kind you carry in your shoulders at three in the afternoon without knowing why, and it makes even good news feel like something else you now have to keep up with.

And it has quietly reframed prayer as a competitor in a race. That is the injury. Prayer stopped feeling like the place you go and started feeling like the slowest item on a list.

You are not behind, and there is no race here whose pace you have failed to match. Scripture says that he that believeth shall not make haste, and read the shape of that promise carefully: not that the believer will be quick enough, but that haste is taken off them altogether, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your willpower who makes a person able to stand still in a fast room.

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.Hebrews 13:8

I want that verse read slowly, because it is doing something specific for you.

It is not saying nothing changes. Everything in that letter's world was changing, violently, and its first readers were losing things they had assumed were permanent. It says that in a world where the furniture is being moved, there is one Person who is not moving with it, and He is the one your feet are actually on.

You have not been set down on ground that shifts. Psalm 40:2 says He set my feet upon a rock and established my goings, and established is the word for a thing made firm on purpose by somebody else, and the Spirit of God is at work in you right now to make that a felt reality rather than a doctrine you would agree with in a survey.

Your praying is not slow, it is moored

Here is the reframe, and it is the only one I want to hand you today.

Prayer is not a slower version of finding out. They are not two speeds of the same activity, which is why the comparison has been quietly wounding: the measuring has set a mooring line against a current and then blamed the mooring for not moving.

The search gives you more of what is moving. Prayer puts you in contact with the One who is not. Those are different acts entirely, and only one of them changes what is underneath you.

You were given this exact hour, and not by accident. Psalm 31:15 says my times are in Thy hand, and the plural in that line is worth noticing, because it covers not only the length of your life but the era of it, and the Holy Spirit set you down in this decade with your particular temperament fully known to Him.

So the pace of things is not a verdict on your usefulness. You are living in your own century, which is the only century anyone has ever had to live in, and every generation of believers has met a change that arrived without consulting them.

And you have exactly what steadiness is made of, which is Him and not information. He promised that He would keep in perfect peace the one whose mind is stayed on Him, and stayed is a mooring word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the staying in a person who cannot hold their own attention still for ten minutes.

I am not going to tell you what is coming. Nobody has that, and anybody handing it out is selling you a pole they have not driven into anything.

What I will tell you is where the poles are.