No Speech, and It Has Been Speaking All Week

Low tide pulls the whole bay out about four hundred meters and leaves it silver and ribbed, and there are three pools that always hold and one that only holds sometimes, and he knows which is which without looking.

Most days. Boots, the path down by the fence post that has been leaning since the storm, out across the flats and back before the water turns.

He does not take a phone. He does not take anything. It is a good habit and he has kept it for years and he would tell you it is the best hour of his day.

And he stood on the ramp this morning and realized he could not tell you what the sky did yesterday. Or the day before. Or any day this month.

He walks it. His eyes are open. He steps round the soft patch by the second pool the way you step round a thing your feet know. And somewhere along the way it stopped arriving.

He is not looking for a religious experience out here and never has been. But he used to come back from that walk with something in him and now he comes back with sand on his boots, and he has quietly concluded that the something was a younger man's, or the weather's, or nothing at all.

Cousin, stand on the ramp with me a minute. Because there is a psalm about things that have no voice and have not stopped speaking since the first morning, and it is worth hearing exactly how the psalm puts it.

Something with no words has been talking all week

David starts the nineteenth psalm with the sky.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.Psalm 19:2

Look at how carefully that is built.

Day unto day uttereth speech. Continuous. Not on special mornings. Every day hands it on to the next like a shift change.

There is no speech nor language. No words. Nothing you could write down.

Where their voice is not heard. And yet it carries, everywhere, without a single word in it.

The psalm is describing something that is speaking without language, constantly, to everybody, and it does not depend on the hearer being in a good season.

You are walking through something that has been speaking every day you were not listening, and its speaking never once required your attention to keep going. That is not a poetic reading of a sunrise; Psalm 19:2 says day unto day uttereth speech and puts no condition on it at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm about the sky and lays it over a tidal flat at seven in the morning. The bay did not go quiet. Something in the hearing did.

Now the second half, and I want to say it carefully because there is a wound under it.

You concluded that the something you used to come back with was a younger man's. That is a hard thing to decide about yourself and you decided it alone, on a beach, without saying it to anybody.

But notice what the psalm does not say. It does not say the sky speaks to the young, or to the receptive, or to those in a good stretch. It says the voice is heard everywhere and there is no place it does not reach. The universality is the whole point of those lines.

You have not been written out of anything, and the reach described in that psalm has no exception in it for a man who has gone quiet. Psalm 19:4 says their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes all the earth include the four hundred meters you walk at low tide.

Creation is not the point of it, and that matters

One more thing, because it keeps this honest.

The psalm does not stop at the sky. Halfway through it turns and spends the rest of itself on the law of the Lord, converting the soul, making wise the simple, enlightening the eyes.

That turn is deliberate. The sky is not the message. The sky is a voice with no words in it, which is glorious and is also, on its own, not enough to tell you anything you could act on. The written word is where the speaking becomes speech.

So I am not going to send you out to find God in a sunrise. I am going to tell you that the sunrise has been telling the truth about Him all week, and that the actual words are somewhere else and available to you whenever you want them.

You are being spoken to in two ways at once, and the wordless one has never had to carry the whole load. Psalm 19:7 says the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, and it is the Holy Spirit who joins the wordless witness and the written one in a man so that neither has to do the other's job.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say hello to the man with the dog.

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 the quality of what you feel on a beach at your age. 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.