The Hundredth Time You Turned

Corine kept count out loud, which was the whole trouble.

"Ninety seven," she said, ducking under the boom.

Ansel did not answer. He was eighty one years old, he had sailed that lake since the war, and he had a way of saying nothing that was somehow the loudest thing on the water.

"Ninety eight."

The wind was coming straight down the lake from the yellow buoy, which meant that the buoy, which was where they were going, was the one direction the boat could not go. So they went at it sideways. Left, then right, then left again, a long zigzag up the water, and every corner of that zigzag was a turn, and Corine had been counting turns since they pushed off because she had decided somewhere in the first ten minutes that the number was proof of something about her.

"Ninety nine. Ansel, this is ridiculous. A child could get to that buoy by now."

"A child would be counting the ducks," he said.

She laughed, and then she pushed the tiller wrong.

It is a small mistake and it has a name and the name is old. The boat came up head to the wind and stopped there, dead in the middle of the lake, nose pointing straight into it. The sail let go of the wind entirely and started to shake. Not a graceful flutter. A hard, loud, slapping noise, canvas cracking like somebody beating a rug, the whole boat shuddering with it and going absolutely nowhere.

In irons. That is what the old men call it.

Corine sat there in all that noise with her hands off everything and her face going red, and she said the thing she had been thinking for an hour.

"I have ruined it."

Ansel leaned over, took her wrist, and put her hand back on the tiller with his own hand over the top of it. His palm was warm. He did not lecture her. He moved her wrist about the width of a dinner plate.

The bow came round a quarter.

And the sail found the wind.

It happened the way it always happens, all at once, with a crack that Corine felt in her chest before she heard it. The canvas snapped full and hard, the boat heeled over and put her shoulder down into the water, and everything that had been shaking a second earlier was suddenly pulling. The rope went tight under her fingers. The lake started running past.

"There," Ansel said.

She was crying and she could not have told you why. She got two words out.

"Ninety nine."

"One hundred," he said. "And the hundredth one filled the same as the first one. The wind never learned to count."

Beloved, stay here in the boat with me a minute. You have a number too. You may not say it out loud, but you know roughly what it is, and you have been carrying it as evidence in a case against yourself. Let us go and look at where the wind actually comes from.

The wind never learned to count

Here is the sentence that gets handed to people, and it is not in Scripture anywhere: God keeps a limited store of patience, and yours has been running down since the year this thing first started.

Nobody says it that plainly. It arrives quieter than that. It arrives as a feeling in the chest when you go to pray about the same thing for the hundredth time, and the feeling says: not this again, not you again.

Now hear what is actually written, from a man sitting in the ruins of a burned city with nothing left to be optimistic about.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 to 23

New every morning. Not topped up. Not rationed out of what was left over from your twenties. Every single sunrise, a fresh issue, and the man writing it was looking at rubble when he wrote it.

So take this as settled, right now, in the tense it is written in. You have not spent anything down. The word says His compassions fail not. The same Spirit who kept that line safe for you across three thousand years is holding it under your eyes at this exact moment.

There is a second thing, and it is about which way the pull runs.

We talk about turning as though it were the engine. It is not the engine. Turning is the tiller. It sets you at an angle where the wind can get into the sail, and the wind is the one that moves the boat, and the wind was blowing long before you touched anything.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Read the order. The love is first. The drawing comes out of the love. And Scripture says plainly that it is the goodness of God that leads a person to repentance, which means the kindness is not the reward at the end of the turning, it is the thing that started the turning in the first place.

You were being drawn on the ninety ninth turn. You were being drawn during the stretch in between, when nothing was moving and the sail was making that terrible noise. His Spirit was not waiting at the buoy with His arms folded to see whether you would arrive under your own power.

And here is the third thing, which is where a lot of us have been stuck for years without a name for it.

There is a difference between being sorry and being turned, and the difference is not the amount of feeling.

For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.2 Corinthians 7:10

The sorrow of the world is a boat in irons. All that shaking, all that noise, real distress, genuine tears, and the vessel is not moving one foot up the lake. That is regret. Regret is loud and it is sincere and it keeps a person exactly where it found them, pointed straight into the very thing that was meant to be carrying them.

Godly sorrow moves the tiller a quarter and the sail fills.

Hear this, because it is yours today and not at the end of a better week: you are not disqualified by the noise you have been making. What is written says the sorrow that comes from Him works a turning that nobody ever needs to be sorry about, and His Spirit is in you doing exactly that work while you read this sentence.

And when the prophets called a people back, listen to what they gave them for the walk home.

Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.Hosea 6:1

Not one word of accusation in the invitation. Not come back and explain yourself. Come, and let us return. Joel says it the same way, and then he tells them why it is safe to come: because He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. That is the reason given. The reason to turn is His character, and His character has not moved since the first time you did this.