Moving on the Face of the Waters

The boat has a patch on the port side that he put on himself four years ago and it has outlasted two better repairs done by people who knew what they were doing, and he is quietly proud of that.

Ten past five. Mist coming up off the bay in that way that looks like the water is breathing. Two of his cousins on the sand because he texted them at half four and they came, because that is what they do.

He has been out here at this hour eleven or twelve times in the last few weeks. Not fishing. Not going anywhere in particular. Out, and around, and back.

He cannot settle. That is the honest way to say it and he has not said it to anybody. He has been unsettled for about six weeks and it has no shape at all. It is not worry, because worry has a subject. It is not sadness. It is a sort of pressure in him that gets worse in a room and eases on the water.

And what he is quietly afraid of is that this is the beginning of something coming apart. He has watched it happen to men. A man gets restless, and then he is not where he should be, and then a family is different.

Cousin, sit on the gunwale a minute before we push off. Because there is a line in the second verse of the whole book, and it is about a Spirit over water before there was anything at all.

Before anything was made, there was a moving over water

Genesis 1. First verse, God created the heaven and the earth. Second verse, this.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Look at the sequence, because it is the whole of what I have to say to you.

Without form, and void. Nothing has taken shape yet. There is stuff, and none of it has a shape.

Darkness upon the face of the deep. Nothing is visible.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And there, in the middle of all that formlessness, something is moving.

The moving comes before the making. The Spirit is over the water while there is still nothing to look at, and the first thing that gets made comes after that sentence and not before it.

You are in a formless stretch with Something moving over it, and the moving in that verse came before anything had taken shape. That is not a poetic use of a creation story; Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit's moving over a void and puts every made thing after it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the second verse of the book and lays it across a bay at ten past five with the mist coming up. Formless is not the opposite of God being at work. In that verse it is the setting for it.

Now the second half, and it is about the fear, because that is what is actually keeping you awake.

You have watched restlessness become wreckage in men you know. So when you find yourself unsettled at forty something, you read it as the first mile of a road you have seen other people go down.

That fear is doing something useful and something harmful at the same time. Useful, because it keeps you honest and it keeps you off that road. Harmful, because it means you cannot bring the restlessness to God at all, since you have already convicted it.

Here is the thing worth knowing. In Scripture, restlessness is never treated as a sin in itself. It is treated as a condition, and what a person does with it is where the story goes. Which means the unsettledness is not the danger. Being alone with it is.

You are not on a road to somewhere bad because something in you is unsettled, and the book does not treat that condition as a fault anywhere. Psalm 139:23 has a man asking God to search him and know his heart, which is what somebody does when he is not afraid of what will be found, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a safe request rather than a risky one.

What comes after the moving

One more thing, and then we will push off.

In Genesis, what comes after the Spirit moving over the water is a voice. And God said. Speech, and then light.

That is worth having in your pocket at five in the morning, because it means the formless part is not the end of the account. It is the first half of a pattern that goes moving, then speech, then shape.

I am not telling you a word is coming for you on a particular schedule. I do not know that. What I am telling you is the order in the pattern, and the order puts the formless stretch before the speaking rather than instead of it.

You are somewhere in a pattern that has always run in that order, and the moving over the water has never once been the last thing in it. Genesis 1:3 says and God said, Let there be light, and it comes after the moving, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an order like that a hope in a man rather than a fact about the first week of the world.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than call the cousins out at half four.

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 clear you are about what is moving on you. 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.