Watchmen Do Not Hurry The Light

The Kilnaught boat goes out at ten to five and Sile has stopped pretending she comes down for any reason other than to stand there.

Her husband was on that boat for nineteen years. He has not been on it for four. She still walks down the hill at half four with a flask, and she stands at the end of the wall, and she watches the crew load in the dark under the one working lamp, and then she watches them go.

She is not a tragic figure and she would be furious if anybody wrote about her as one. She has a garden and a book group and a very loud dog. It is simply that this is the part of the day she has, and it is the part where nothing is required of her.

Her neighbor Ena started coming down with her in the winter. Ena is the sort who fills silences, and for the first few mornings she filled every one of them, and then one Thursday she stopped and they just stood there.

After a while Ena said, "How long do you stay?"

And Sile said, "Till it comes up."

Ena said, "The boat?"

"The light."

That is the whole thing, and Ena said afterwards it took her about two weeks to understand what she had been told. Sile does not stand on the wall waiting for the boat. The boat goes at ten to five and she could go home at five past. She stands there until the sky goes from black to the color that is not black yet, which in January is nearly three quarters of an hour.

She said the thing that Ena has repeated to about eleven people since. She said: "I used to think I was hanging about. Then I worked out I was doing something."

You have been standing in the dark too. Something has not changed, and it has not changed for long enough that you have started to suspect the waiting is your fault, that a person with more of whatever it is would be past this by now. And nobody has stood on a wall next to you and told you that watching is not the same as hanging about.

The Psalm Puts A Job Title On It

There is a line in one of the short psalms that gives the waiting a name, and the name is not a soft one.

"My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning."Psalm 130:6

He says it twice. That is not a mistake and it is not padding. The man is reaching for a comparison and when he finds it he is so satisfied by it that he says it again.

A watchman is not a person who has failed to sleep. A watchman is a person with a post. He is out there in the last and worst part of the night, which is the coldest hour and the one where everything feels least likely, and the entire content of his job is to be looking east while it is still dark.

You are at a post rather than in a gap. Psalm 130 gives the waiting a job title rather than an apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient watchman and stands him next to a woman on a harbor wall at ten past five in January.

And the second half of that comparison is the part that does the work. Nobody watching for the morning is trying to make it happen. That is not what the watching is for. He cannot hurry it. He is not required to hurry it. He is required to be facing the right way when it comes.

You have not been asked to produce the light, only to be looking at where it comes from. That is what the written word says about waiting on God, over and over, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that land as dignity instead of as consolation.

Nothing Is Being Withheld From You On That Wall

Now the part that has to be said carefully, because there is a real wound near it and a lot of bad teaching around it.

When a thing has not changed for four years, people start explaining it. They explain it to you kindly and they explain it to you unkindly and either way what you are left holding is a theory about why the light has not come, and most of those theories end up being about you.

This page has no theory. What Psalm 130 has instead of a theory is a posture and a promise, and it never once puts the delay down to the watchman.

The light is not being withheld from you. It is not late because of something you did not do. Morning is not a reward that gets released when a person reaches a standard, and there is no version of that psalm in which the watchman speeds it up by being better at his job.

You are not the reason it is still dark. It is written that with the Lord there is mercy and plenteous redemption, in the same psalm, three lines further down, and His Spirit is the one who has been standing on that wall with you every morning you thought you were alone out there.

And say the guard plainly, because this is exactly where a good word turns heavy. Nothing on this page asks you for anything. No length of waiting, no attitude you have to hold, no schedule, no minimum, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere. If you go home at five past five tomorrow and do not stay for the light, you are exactly as much His walking up that hill, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from turning into a standard you can fall short of.