The Tide Chart on the Wall

The chart is thumbtacked inside the door of the shed where it has been since his father's time, a new one every year from the same place, and it is the most reliable object in his life.

High water at four eleven. That is what it says for today, in a column, in print.

Ikaika is standing on the top of the ramp at ten past four looking at a beach that goes out flat and gray for what looks like half a mile, with the water a long way off doing nothing in particular, and there are two people walking a dog down there where at four eleven there is not supposed to be anything but sea.

He has been reading these charts since he was nine years old. He knows exactly what is happening. There is a lag between what the water looks like it is doing and what the water is doing, and the flat gray out there is already moving, and by twenty past he will be able to see it, and by half past nobody will be walking a dog.

He knows that the way he knows his own address.

And he has been standing at the top of that ramp since a quarter to, because there is a thing in his life where he does not know it, and he came out here for the same reason he has come out here since he was a boy, which is that the shape of it helps.

He was forgiven in March. He believes that. He would say it plainly to anyone.

He has not felt one thing different since.

If you are reading a chart that says one thing and a beach that says another, this is written for you. And I want to give you a psalm that asks a question everybody has asked and gives an answer nobody expects.

The question nobody can answer

Here is the verse.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?

Now, the word behind mark is a bookkeeping word. It means to watch closely and keep account of. Not to notice. To record, with an eye to what will be done about it later.

So the question is: if God kept a running account with intent to act on it, who could remain upright.

And the answer, which the psalm does not bother to supply because it does not need to, is nobody. Not the man at the top of the ramp. Not the person who wrote the psalm. Not one person who has ever lived, and the question is asked in a form that assumes the reader knows that already.

I want to point at something in the shape of that, because it does a quiet and important thing. It removes the comparison. The question is not who is standing well. It is not who stands better than the man beside him. It is who stands at all, and the answer is nobody, which means nobody in that psalm is being measured against anybody else and the ground is entirely level.

You are standing on completely level ground, and the question in that verse takes every comparison out of the room. Psalm 130:3 asks who shall stand and expects the answer nobody, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written leveling and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands at the top of a ramp.

Forgiveness is with Him

Then comes the next line, and it is the answer to the whole thing, and it is not the answer anybody expects.

But there is forgiveness with thee.

Not: but the debt is canceled. Not: but God forgives. There is forgiveness with thee, which is a statement about location. It says forgiveness is a thing that is where God is. A property of the place. A supply held in a particular set of hands.

That is a completely different picture from the one most of us carry. Most of us imagine forgiveness as an event that has to be set off, and therefore as something whose existence depends on the asking being done correctly.

The psalm has it as a thing that is simply there with Him, in the way water is with the sea. It does not have to be generated. It does not run out and it does not depend on the quality of the request.

You are dealing with a God who has forgiveness with Him as a standing property rather than as an event you have to trigger correctly. Scripture puts it as a location and not as a transaction, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the standing out has stretched into something heavier, if the nights have gotten long, or if the thinking has traveled past the flatness and out toward wishing to be gone, get somebody alongside you. Call a doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another person be in it with you. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.

A chart outranks a beach

Now here is what I will and will not tell you.

I will not tell you the feeling comes at half past four, or in a month, or ever. I do not know. Some people get the shift and some people get fifty faithful years without one, and the second group have not done anything wrong. Anybody who hands you a schedule is handing you something they made up.

What I will tell you is which of the two instruments has authority.

The chart is a record of what the water is actually doing, produced by people who measured the whole system over a long time. The beach is what one person can see from one place at one moment. When they disagree, it is not a close call and nobody who works on the water treats it as one. You do not stand at the top of a ramp at ten past four and conclude the tide has been canceled.

The written promise is the chart. What is going on in your chest is the beach at ten past four.

You are looking at a beach and holding a chart, and it was never a close call between them. Psalm 130:3 and the line under it record what is true about God rather than what is visible from where a person stands, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And to the man who has quietly concluded that March did not take: nothing about the flat gray is evidence. It does not mean the asking was poor or that it must be done again more thoroughly. There is nothing to redo.

You were forgiven, and the absence of a shift is not a shortfall in you or in what was given. The written promise attaches no feeling to itself at any point, and it is His Spirit and not your ability to detect Him who makes a given thing actually given.