One Stroke Against The Current

The river at this hour is the color of strong tea, and the boat has no motor on it, and that is on purpose.

He is sixty-four. Most evenings in July he carries the aluminum boat down the gravel, drops it in above the bend, and lets the water do the work. Cicadas going in the cottonwoods. Paddle across his knees. He is not fishing. He has never once been fishing.

He is thinking about a telephone call he did not return in April.

The dock light comes on at his landing at about the same time every night, a hard little blue-white star on a pole above the gravel, and it is the one landmark on this whole stretch. It goes by on his right. It always goes by on his right, because by the time he notices it he is already past it, and by the time he decides to do something about it he is a quarter mile down, and by then the argument in his head has started.

Tonight the argument goes the way it goes every night. Tomorrow he will do this properly. Tomorrow he will bring the little motor, put in above the shoals, plan the run, come back up under power like a person who has his affairs in order. Tomorrow he will make the call, too, and he will say the whole thing, the entire speech, all of it, the way it deserves to be said.

Meanwhile the river carries him another quarter mile.

His granddaughter is nine and she is in the bow with a flashlight, pointing it at things that do not need pointing at. Herons. A tire. Her own foot.

She says, "Papa, we went past the light."

"I know."

"You always go past the light."

"I know."

She swings the flashlight around and puts it in her lap. Then she picks up the spare paddle, the short cracked one they keep under the seat for emergencies that never happen, leans over the left side of the bow, and puts in one stroke.

One. Not hard. She is nine.

And the whole boat pivots. Slow and heavy, the way a loaded johnboat does, but it pivots, and the bow that has been aimed at the dark comes around until it is aimed at the little blue-white star on the pole a mile upriver.

"There," she says, and goes back to her flashlight.

He sits there with his own paddle still across his knees.

Nothing has changed. He is exactly one mile from home, same as one second ago. Same water, same night, same unreturned call. But he is not going further. For the first time in five weeks he is not going further, and the only thing that happened was that somebody put one stroke in on the other side.

The turn is a direction, not a distance

Sorry for years, and further downstream than when you started.

That is not a contradiction and it is not hypocrisy. It is what regret does. Regret is motion in the same direction with a bad feeling attached to it, and the bad feeling is so uncomfortable that everyone involved mistakes it for movement. You can feel terrible about the current the entire time it carries you.

Which is why the word in the prophets is never sorry. It is turn.

Turn ye unto me, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 1:3

Read who moves first in that sentence, and read who moves second. There is no waiting period between them and there is no size requirement on the first one.

You have permission to turn small. That is not me being kind to you, it is what is written: in Joel the same call comes with the instruction to rend the heart and not the garments, which is God Himself telling a whole nation to stop tearing their clothes in public and just come, and His Spirit has been saying it under your breastbone for a while now.

Tearing the garments was the production. It was the visible, expensive, unmistakable version, the one that everybody in the street could see and count. And He says: not that. The heart. Which nobody can see and nobody can count.

Now sit with the arithmetic of the boat for a second, because it matters.

The girl's stroke did not move him one inch closer to the dock. It changed which way the bow was pointed. Distance is a matter of time and paddling, and the distance was never the emergency. Direction was the emergency, and direction is settled in a single stroke.

The father in the story Jesus told saw the son while he was still a great way off. Still a great way off. The whole mile was still there. The rehearsed speech was still in the boy's mouth and he only ever got about half of it out, because the old man was already running. Luke 15 is not the account of a distance closed by a son, it is the account of a direction noticed by a father, and the same Spirit who moved a hand to write that down is not measuring your speech either.

So the shame can go. It has no right to stay in the boat with you. Hosea 6 opens with come and let us return, spoken by people who had already ruined it, and there is not one syllable of accusation in the sentence.

And if you have turned a hundred times before this evening, hear it plainly: the hundred and first stroke is worth exactly what the first one was worth. The river does not remember and neither does He. You are met the same way on the hundredth night as on the first, because what is written is that He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and it is His Spirit and not your record that carries you the rest of the way up.