Put In The Water For A Voyage

The shed smells like varnish and it has smelled like varnish since the year his father died.

The hull was his father's idea. Eighteen feet, carvel planked, laid down over one winter by a man who did not live to see the second one, and left in the shed under a tarp with the ribs bare. He finished her in three years. Three years, evenings, with a book propped open on a paint tin.

That was eleven years ago.

Since then he has put nine coats of varnish on her. He has replaced the cleats twice because he did not like the shape of the first ones, and then did not like the shape of the second ones either. He built a new rudder in a year when there was nothing whatever wrong with the old rudder. Every March he takes the cover off and works on her every weekend until October, and then he puts the cover back on and turns the light off in the shed.

She has never been wet.

His daughter is twenty-two and home for a weekend in September, and she comes out to the shed with two cups of coffee because that is what they do, and she stands there looking at eighteen feet of glowing brightwork in a shed with a dirt floor.

"Dad," she says, "what's she for?"

He starts saying the thing he always says, about how she is not quite ready and there is a soft spot near the transom he wants to look at, and he hears himself say it, and it does not sound the way it usually sounds.

"She's the most finished thing I've ever seen in my life," his daughter says.

Two Saturdays later there are six people in the yard at four in the afternoon and a borrowed trailer with one bad tire, and it takes forty minutes and a great deal of unnecessary advice to get her out of the shed and down to the ramp at the end of the road.

He shouts instructions the whole way. Mind the rubbing strake. Not like that. Somebody take the stern.

Then they walk her down the concrete with their hands under the gunwale, and the water comes up her side, cold and brown and completely uninterested in the nine coats, and she lifts.

That is the moment. She lifts. Eleven years of an object being looked after in a shed, and then she comes off their hands and sits down in the water, and she is not furniture any more.

He stands there in the shallows in his good shoes with his hands out in front of him like a man who has just put down something heavy, and his daughter is taking a photograph, and one of the neighbors is already asking where they are going first.

Nobody ever mentioned the launch

You gave a lot of things up.

That part is real, and it is worth honoring. Somewhere along the way you stopped doing things you used to do, changed how you spoke, walked away from company you had enjoyed, and you did it because you meant it. And then somebody asked what all of it had set you apart for, and no answer came, and the pause went on a beat too long, and you filed it away as a failure of yours.

It was not. You were handed the sanding and nobody mentioned the launch, and His Spirit has been holding the other half of that sentence open for you the whole time.

As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.Acts 13:2

Read who does the separating in that sentence, and read what it is for.

The Holy Spirit does it, and He does it for a work He had already called them to. Nobody in the room ran an assessment. Nobody asked Saul whether he felt ready, and if they had, the man who had once been the worst possible candidate would have had a great deal to say about it. He is separated by the Spirit of God, for a purpose that was already assigned, in the middle of an ordinary meeting.

Now go back to the older picture, because the pattern is the same and it is even plainer.

In Leviticus 8, Aaron and his sons are consecrated, and the sequence runs like this: they are washed, then clothed, then anointed with oil, and then blood is put on the tip of the right ear, on the thumb of the right hand, and on the great toe of the right foot.

Count the verbs and notice whose they are. Moses washed them. Moses clothed them. Moses anointed them. Moses put it on the ear and the thumb and the toe. Aaron stood there. In the entire ceremony, the man being set apart does not perform one single action on himself.

You were consecrated by somebody else's hands, and this is already the case rather than pending. That is what is written in Leviticus 8, and the same Spirit who separated two men in a meeting room in Antioch has been at work on you in exactly that direction.

And look at the three places the blood goes, because the map is generous and nobody ever draws it for people. The ear, for what you hear. The thumb, for what your hands do. The toe, for where your feet take you. Hearing, working, going. That is not a list of things to abstain from. That is a whole person marked out for a voyage.

Holiness got flattened into abstention somewhere and it cost the church a generation of tired people. The list of things you left is the shavings on the shed floor. The list is real and it is not the boat.

Then there is the promise underneath all of it, and this is the one that takes the weight off your arms for good.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.Ezekiel 36:26-27

Cause you to walk. Not require you to walk. His Spirit inside a person is the engine of the walking, and a new heart is already yours by that promise, so the readiness you keep failing to certify was never on your side of the ledger in the first place.

So the shed door can come open. Not because you finally finished. Because she was built to be put in the water, and the water was never going to care about the ninth coat.