I Made You and I Will Carry You

The tarpaulin has a rip in the corner that has been mended twice with different tape and the second tape is not holding either.

Golden hour. Three of them at it, because it turns out that pulling a cover off a boat is a four hand job and there are six hands here and two of them are mostly holding a coffee.

His nephews came round for something else. Somebody said the words is that still under there and now this is happening.

The cover comes off in one long haul and there is the boat, and it is fine, it is completely fine, it just has that look a boat gets.

And he cannot remember stopping. That is the thing that has caught him. There was no last trip. There was no decision. There was a summer and then there was a summer he did not, and then it had been a while, and then it was under a tarpaulin.

And now, standing here with the cover in his hands, he has started a list.

The boat. The Thursday thing he used to go to. Writing to his sister properly instead of texting. Reading anything longer than an article. All of it stopped the same way: not decided, just quietly discontinued.

Cousin, put the cover down on the grass. Because there is one of the most tender verses in Isaiah about being carried, and it is spoken to people about the whole length of their lives.

From the womb to the gray hairs

Isaiah 46. God is contrasting Himself with idols that have to be carried around on carts by the people who made them, and then He says this.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count the verbs and count whose they are.

I am he. His. I will carry you. His. I have made. His. I will bear. His. I will carry. His. Will deliver you. His.

Six, in one verse, and every single one of them is His. There is nothing at all in that sentence for anybody else to do.

And notice the span it covers: to old age, to gray hairs. It is deliberately the whole length of a life, including the stretches in the middle where nothing much appeared to be happening.

You have been carried across the whole length of it, including the years nothing was decided in, and every verb in that verse belongs to Him. That is not a comforting reading of a hard chapter; Isaiah 46:4 stacks six first person verbs and leaves nothing for the person being carried, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a chapter about idols on carts and lays it beside a boat in the golden hour. The carrying was never a thing you were managing.

Now the list, and I want to look at it honestly with you rather than talk you out of it.

Everything on that list stopped the same way, and you are right about that. Not decided. Discontinued.

But here is what a list like that always leaves out. It only contains the things that stopped. It does not contain a single thing that started or continued in the same stretch, because nobody makes that list, because the things that keep going do not announce themselves.

Your nephews are in your yard on a weekday afternoon pulling a cover off a boat with you. That did not happen by accident. Somebody kept something going with those boys through all the years the boat was under a tarpaulin, and it was you.

You have been keeping things alive during the stretch you are prosecuting, and none of those appear on a list of what stopped. Galatians 6:9 says let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person doing well through years they get no report on.

What He does not say about the boat

One more thing, because I do not want to sell you anything.

That verse does not say you will take the boat out again. It does not promise you the Thursday thing back or a renewed correspondence with your sister. There is no clause about restoring a man's hobbies.

What it says is that He carries. Which means the thing that has been holding you up through a stretch when quite a lot quietly stopped was not your own momentum, and it did not fail when your momentum did.

That is a different and better promise than getting the list back, because the list can come and go and the carrying does not.

You have been held by something that does not depend on your momentum, and it did not stop when your momentum did. Isaiah 46:4 puts the bearing and the delivering in the same breath as the making, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unbroken carrying a felt fact in a man standing next to a boat.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than tell the nephews where to stand.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how many of the things on that list you can restart this summer. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.