Nobody Crosses It Twice

The mattress went on the roof of the truck and the chickens went in a crate against the tailgate, and that is how the Duartes crossed the Palo Verde in the August that Paloma turned seven.

There was no bridge for eleven kilometers in either direction, so if you were moving a household from the dry side of the valley to the town side, you took the low place where the road simply went down into the water and came up again on the far bank. Everybody did it. Everybody had an opinion about how it should be done, and every single one of those opinions got shouted at once.

Paloma crossed on her uncle Chalo's shoulders, with her shoes hanging around her neck tied together by the laces, because her mother had views about wet shoes. She remembers three things. She remembers the water going brown at the edges where the truck pushed it. She remembers her uncle's hands locked over her ankles and how he did not look down once. And she remembers somebody's hat going past her, sideways, at speed, and a great deal of laughing about it that went on for years afterward.

On the other side there was a house with a lemon tree in the yard and a room she did not have to share.

Twelve years later she was nineteen, and she had a year that took her apart.

There is no need to list it. Everybody gets a year like that eventually, and hers came with the particular cruelty of arriving right after she had told everyone she was doing well. By the spring she was flat, and by the summer she had arrived at a conviction that she carried around like a stone in her coat.

She said it out loud at the kitchen table, to Chalo, who was old now and drank his coffee standing up.

"I think I need to go back and cross it again."

She meant it. That was the thing. She was not being poetic. Somewhere in that year she had worked out that whatever happened in the August she was seven, it had not taken, or she had undone it, and the only honest thing left was to go back to the dry side of the valley and do the whole thing properly this time.

Chalo put his cup down.

"Mija. Look at your feet."

She looked at him instead.

"Look at your feet," he said again, so she looked down at the kitchen tiles.

"You are standing on this side. Your bed is up those stairs. That lemon tree out there was a stick when we planted it and now I cannot see over it. You did not cross that river because you felt something in the water. You crossed it because we all got in the truck and we went, and I carried you, and my hands were the ones that were locked."

"I have gone back over it a hundred times in my head," she said.

"I know you have." He picked the cup back up. "But going back over it in your head is not a river. You have been standing in this kitchen the whole time you were doing it."

She went out and stood under the lemon tree for a while in the dark, and it was the same tree it had been in August, and she was on the same side of the water she had been on since she was seven years old, and none of the year that had taken her apart had moved so much as a meter of it.

The washings were meant to repeat. The crossing was not.

Water has been where God does separating work since the third sentence of the Bible.

He gathers the waters together into one place in Genesis 1:10 and calls the dry land Earth, and He looks at it and says it is good. That is the first thing water is for in Scripture: not for scrubbing, but for God making one thing into two things and then naming the new one.

Then comes a whole system of washings, and this is where most of us got confused, because it looks like the same thing and it is not.

Read Leviticus and Numbers with an eye on the frequency and you will notice something almost tender about it. Wash, and be unclean until the evening. Wash again after this. Wash again after that. Water and evening, water and evening, week after week after week, for a lifetime. There is nothing wrong with any of it. It was doing exactly the job it was designed to do, which was to keep saying, gently and constantly, that something needed dealing with which a basin was never going to finish.

You have been handed a basin and told it was a river, and that is why you are exhausted. Ezekiel 36:25 promised clean water sprinkled on a people by somebody else's hand. That promise is not landing on you because I put it in a paragraph. The Holy Spirit is carrying it.

Read that verse and look at the verb. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean. Not: wash yourself more thoroughly. Not: keep going until it holds. The hand in that promise belongs to God, and the people receiving it are standing still.

Then a man appears at a river with a message, and the whole countryside walks out to him, and something changes shape. People go down into the water once. Not weekly. Once, in public, in daylight, in front of everybody they knew, and they come up on the other side of a decision. That is not a wash. That is a crossing, and everybody watching understood the difference.

And on the day three thousand people found out exactly what they had been part of, the answer they were given was not a program. Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, Peter says in Acts 2:38, and three thousand people crossed over in one afternoon.

Now let me be careful with you here, because this is where people get hurt.

If that crossing has never happened for you, I am not going to tell you where or how. Not a place, not a method, not a way to do it quietly by yourself tonight. Find someone. Find a pastor, a believer, a congregation, somebody who knows you and will stand with you and walk you through it in daylight. That is where this message stops, on purpose. A crossing was never designed to be a solo project and I am not going to hand you one off a page.

But if the crossing has already happened, then this next verse is your deed of title.

Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.Romans 6:4

Buried. Nobody is buried twice.

You were included in something that was completed, and Romans 6:4 says it in the past tense, and His Spirit is the seal on it rather than your consistency, which means a bad year cannot reopen a grave that God closed. You are on this side of the water. Look at your feet.

And notice who does the raising in that verse. Christ was raised up by the glory of the Father, and then Paul says even so, in the same way, by the same power, we walk in newness of life. The walking is downstream of the raising. It is not the entrance fee for it.