He Checked The Water Every Morning For A Year

He goes down before work. It is about a nine minute walk and he has been doing it since a year ago last spring.

He stands where the path comes out and he looks at the water, and he reads it the way people who grew up near water read it, without deciding to. Chop, swell, the color of it, which way the wind has been overnight, whether the birds are working.

And every morning he decides that today is not the day.

He is not being unreasonable about it either. That is what makes this so hard to see from inside. Some mornings the water genuinely is bad, and he is right, and anybody would agree with him. Some mornings it is only moderate and he would rather not start on a moderate day. And a handful of mornings, maybe fifteen in a year, it has been beautiful, glassy and gold, and on those mornings something else always came up, and he could name what it was on each one and every one of them was true.

Four hundred mornings, give or take.

The walk has become the thing. He would not have said that a year ago, but he can hear it now if he is honest: he does not go down to the water in order to go out on it. He goes down to check whether he has to.

And there is a kind of relief in the reading. When the water is wrong, the day is settled by seven in the morning, and he can go to work with the question closed, and he sleeps fine.

He is not lazy and he is not afraid of the water. He has been in worse water than most of these mornings, years ago, when he was younger and it never occurred to him to check anything.

Somewhere in the last year the checking became the practice, and the going became a thing that would happen once the checking gave permission.

And the checking has never once given permission, because that is not what checking is for.

And you have a morning inspection too. It might not be water. It might be your energy, or the mood in the house, or how the week looks. And you have been running it for a long time, and it keeps coming back the same.

The river was in flood and the water did not move until their feet were in it

There is a river crossing in Joshua that has one detail in it which changes everything, and it is easy to read past.

The Jordan is at flood stage. The account says so specifically, which is the writer making sure nobody imagines a stream. This is the worst possible month, the water is over the banks, and this is when the whole nation is told to cross.

And the instruction is this.

And when the soles of the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off.Joshua 3:13

Read the order of those two clauses, because the order is the entire lesson.

Feet in the water first. Then the water goes.

Not a parting, followed by a walk across dry ground. Men carrying a heavy thing walked down a bank into a flooded river in the worst month of the year, and got wet, and only then did anything change.

You are being asked to step into conditions that have not improved, and that is not recklessness, it is the actual sequence God has used before. It is written that the waters would be cut off when the soles of their feet rested in them (Joshua 3:13), and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a favorable forecast who makes a man able to put a foot into flood water on the strength of a sentence.

Now the checking, and we are going to be gentle with it, because it comes from a good place.

Reading conditions is wisdom in its proper place. A man who never looks at water is a fool and the sea will teach him that quickly. Nobody here is telling you to become careless, and this page will never tell a reader to be reckless with their body or their family or their work.

But there is a difference between reading conditions in order to go, and reading conditions in order to find out whether you have to. The first is seamanship. The second is a door with a lock on the inside, and a year is how long it takes to notice which one you are doing.

You are free to stop running the inspection, and stopping it is not carelessness, because the inspection stopped being about the water a long time ago. Scripture says the fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe (Proverbs 29:25), and it is His Spirit who shows a person the difference between caution and a snare that looks exactly like caution.

And here is the part that will sting a little and then set you free.

On the fifteen beautiful mornings, something else came up. Every time. And each of those things was genuinely true, and you could produce a witness for every one of them.

Fifteen out of fifteen is not a coincidence, and you already know that, and you have known it since about the ninth one.

You are not being accused of anything here, and the pattern is being shown to you rather than held against you, because seeing it is what breaks it. It is written that the Lord knows our frame and remembers we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who can show a man a year of his own mornings without one word of condemnation in it.

So the change is small and it is specific.

The step goes first. Not the reading of the water. The step, done at whatever size is real for today, before the walk down, before the assessment, before the day has a chance to be settled by seven in the morning.

You have a step available today in exactly the conditions that are actually out there, and the conditions were never the gate, they were only ever the weather. Scripture says we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and it is His Spirit rather than the sight of the water who tells a man the ground is there.