Still On The Headland

His feet are set where they have been set since he was twenty, and the water has never once done what he wanted, and he is still up here.

Golden hour, which out here is not a phrase from a photograph but an actual change in the air. The grass laid over. The rock underfoot that goes slick in the wet and never has when it matters. Two boats a long way out doing something he could describe from here with his eyes shut.

He came up first with his grandfather at about six. He has come up on his own since he was twenty. There have been years when he came up daily and years when he came once a month and one year, which he does not talk about, when he did not come up at all.

Thirty one years of standing on the same rock looking at the same water.

And what he thinks, standing there, is not a complaint. He is not a complaining man and his people are not complaining people. It is a plain sentence and it goes: nothing I have wanted from this water has happened.

The land is not back. The thing about the land is what it was and there is no version of it turning out differently that anybody now living will see. The people he wanted to bring up here are not here. Some of them are gone and some of them are far away and one of them will not speak to him.

He is fifty one. His feet are exactly where they were.

And he calls that failure, quietly, most times he comes up. He has never said the word out loud on this rock but it is the word.

That is you, and your headland might be a house you have not left, a role nobody replaced, a hope you have never actually let go of even though you stopped talking about it.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to stand out there and take it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not the one who will not speak. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. It has been tried on you up here by people who love you. I am not going to tell you it is nearly over either, because I do not know that, and neither did any of them.

Habakkuk puts the feet at the end of the worst chapter he wrote

There is a sentence at the very end of a short and difficult book, and everything about where it sits matters as much as what it says.

The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.Habakkuk 3:19

Habakkuk spends three chapters asking why. He does not get an answer, not really. He gets a great deal about who God is and almost nothing about the thing he actually asked, which is a pattern anybody who has stood on a headland for thirty one years will recognize.

And the verse immediately before this one is the famous one: although the fig tree does not blossom, although there is no fruit, although the flock is cut off from the fold, yet will I rejoice. That is a man listing everything that has not happened.

And then this. Feet.

Hinds' feet. Which is a picture of an animal that is steady on ground where nothing else is. Not fast. Not powerful. Sure footed, specifically, on high places, which is where he already is.

He does not ask to be taken off the high places. He asks to be able to stand on them.

You are being made steady on the exact ground you are already standing on. That is not a lift for a man in a wind: Habakkuk 3:19 puts the feet at the end of a list of things that did not happen and asks for steadiness on the high place rather than removal from it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a steady thing steady in a body that has called this failure for years rather than the resolve anybody can find at golden hour.

Still here is not the same as failed

Here is what thirty one years does to a word, and it is worth taking apart carefully.

He has taken still here and filed it under failed, and once those two are filed together they cannot be separated by argument, because every year that passes puts another entry in the same folder.

But look at what the two words actually describe.

Failed is a verdict on an outcome. It requires that there was a target and it was missed, and it assumes the man knows what the target was and who set it.

Still here is a description of a position. It says where a man is standing and how long he has been standing there, and it makes no claim about outcomes whatsoever.

And Scripture attaches its one instruction to the second thing. Stand. Four times in six verses and there is no fifth verb in that passage, and nowhere in it is anybody measured by distance covered or water changed.

You have been standing, and standing was never a verdict on anything. The written word puts the steadiness on the high place and never once grades a believer by what happened out on the water, and the Spirit of God has been what has had a man up here since he was twenty, never the outcomes anybody can count at fifty one.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. There is no push in this. There is a man with his feet set and a word about feet.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is still on their feet at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has kept a man's boots on the same rock through thirty one years of the water doing whatever it liked.