Through The Gap In The Reef

At six in the morning the lagoon is flat as a plate, and out past the last stake the reef is doing what it does, which is being white.

He has been on the inside run for seven months. Four landings, one loop, twice a day. Crates of rice and cooking oil and one carton of school exercise books that has been going back and forth for three weeks because nobody will sign for it. He knows every coral head inside the lagoon the way a man knows the furniture in a dark house.

He has never once gone out through the gap.

He tells people it is because of the boat. The boat is fine. It is because of the sound the reef makes at four in the morning when the wind drops and everything else goes quiet, that long grinding roar with no edges on it, and because of the white. The white line runs the whole length of the island and it looks exactly like the end of the world, and he has decided, without ever saying it out loud to a single person, that the water is what is in his way.

Then an old woman comes down the landing with a basket and asks him to run her over to the next island.

"I do not do the passage," he says.

She looks at him for a second. Then she steps over the gunwale, sits down at the tiller with the basket on her knees, and says, "Then I will."

She has been running that passage since before he was born.

Halfway out she makes him come and sit beside her, and she points up at the hill behind the village, and there are two stakes up there, one above the other, weathered gray, that he has looked at every day for seven months and never once seen.

"Line them up," she says. "One over the other. Hold that. Do not look at the white."

He holds the line. The roar comes up on both sides and the boat goes into a lane of water that is not white at all. It is green. Deep, clear, moving green, thirty feet wide, and it slides them out into the long slow swell on the other side without one hard motion.

He turns around and looks back at it.

"Why is it there?" he says.

She shrugs. "Everything the tide brings in has to leave," she says. "It leaves through there. That is why nothing has ever grown across it."

The water he had been afraid of was the reason there was a door at all.

They come back that same evening on the last of the light, and the two stakes line up just as well from the other side, and the man who has been going in circles inside a lagoon for seven months brings the boat home down the green lane.

The water was never the thing in your way

Somebody taught you that the water is the hazard.

Not with a sentence. Nobody ever sits you down and says it. It arrives as an atmosphere: the sense that the clean part of this is your department, that you will be working at it for the rest of your life, and that the loop of the four landings is what a serious person does. So you have gone round and round inside the lagoon, scrubbing the same spot, and it never comes clean, and you have decided the white line is the end of the world.

So look at where the water in Scripture actually comes from, because His Spirit has been pointing at this door for longer than you know.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.Genesis 1:9-10

That is the third day, and the gathering is His own doing, and He looks at it and calls it good. Water is not an accident that got into the world. It was gathered on purpose by God before there was a single person to be afraid of it, and the same Spirit who was moving over the face of the deep two verses earlier is the one at work in you while you read that.

So the washing. There is a lot of washing in Leviticus, and it is worth noticing what kind it is. Wash, and be unclean until evening. Wash again next time. Wash the garment, wash the vessel, wash the body, and then live your life and come back and do it again. It is a rhythm, not a finish line, and anybody who has tried to be good enough to pray knows exactly what that loop feels like from the inside.

Then the prophets say something that breaks the loop wide open. In Ezekiel 36 the promise is that clean water will be sprinkled on you and you will be clean. Read the grammar of it. You are not the one carrying the bucket. It is poured out on you, from His side, by His initiative, and you are the one it lands on.

And you are on the receiving end of that, right now, without a single improvement first. That is not my opinion, it is what is written in Ezekiel 36. He said it once, and His Spirit has never stopped saying it, which is why a sentence that old stops being a paragraph and starts being about you.

Then a man stood in a river, and people came out to him, and they went into the Jordan and came up out of it, and it was not a scrub. It was a line, crossed in public, in front of witnesses, once. Israel had crossed that same river generations before to get out of the wilderness and into the land, and the water there was never the obstacle either, it was the border.

And when a crowd asked the plainest question anybody ever asks in Scripture, what shall we do, the answer in Acts 2 was not try harder. It was be baptized, and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. A crossing, and a gift, and nothing about a performance.

You have been treating a door as a wall. The white line is not the end of the world, and this is already settled from His side, because what is written is that He gathered those waters and called them good, and His Spirit has been pointing at the two stakes on the hill the whole time you have been going round the inside loop.

Now here is where this article stops, and it stops on purpose.

I am not going to tell you where, or when, or how deep, or how. Nothing about this belongs to a page and none of it belongs to you alone. Find a person. Someone who follows Jesus and knows your name. Say it out loud to them, today if you want, and let them carry it from there and stand with you in it. A crossing is made in company. That is the whole instruction, and there is not one more line of it.