The Tide Table And The Water

He has a tide table in one hand and the water in front of him is plainly saying something else, and he is standing there having to pick one.

Mid morning, bright, the kind of clear day that makes everything look more certain than it is. Flat sand going out a long way, that rippled hard sand you can drive a vehicle on. Two birds working the shallows. A line of weed marking where the last tide got to, which is further up than it should be if the paper is right.

The table says low water at eleven forty. It is twenty past eleven. And the water is doing something he does not like, coming in around the far side of the bank in a way that low water twenty minutes off does not usually look like.

The table is not wrong. Tide tables are not wrong. They are computed, checked, printed by people whose entire working lives are this.

And his eyes are telling him something else, and his eyes have been on this coast for thirty years, and they have been right before.

So he does the thing anybody does, which is stand still and look at the paper and then look at the water and then look at the paper.

And he thinks, without any drama at all, about a man he knew who trusted his eyes on a day like this one.

He goes back up. Not fast, and not because he has resolved anything. He simply decides that today he will be the sort of man who is embarrassed on the sand rather than the other thing.

That is you, and your tide table might be something you were told about yourself, a promise you were given, a thing you know is true and that this week is loudly contradicting.

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. 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.

The psalm makes one claim about the word and it is a claim about reliability

There is a verse in the middle of a psalm about the sky, and when it turns from the sky to the word it makes a very specific claim.

The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.Psalm 19:7

Perfect. And then, in case that is too abstract, sure.

Sure is the word that matters out on sand. Sure is not a word about how impressive a thing is. It is a word about whether it can be relied on while somebody is standing in front of something that contradicts it. Nobody uses that word about things that are never tested.

And notice the second half of each clause, because that is where the psalm says what it does to a person. Converting the soul. Making wise the simple. Both of those describe an effect on somebody who is not already wise, not already converted, and therefore not in a position to evaluate.

Which is the actual situation on that sand. He is not being asked to assess the tide table. He does not have the equipment to; it is computed from data he could not produce. He is being asked whether he will stand on it.

You are holding something that has been called sure by somebody who knew it would be tested. That is not a comfort with the water doing what it is doing: Psalm 19:7 calls the testimony sure and describes it working on people who cannot evaluate it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a sure thing hold under a man on wet sand rather than the confidence anybody can generate at twenty past eleven.

Your eyes are not lying to you

Now the part that has to be said carefully, because this is where a great deal of harm gets done with a verse.

Nothing here is telling him his eyes are lying. They are not. He has thirty years on that coast and his eyes are excellent, and there is every chance that what he is seeing is real and has an explanation: a bank that has moved, a wind, a river running higher than usual somewhere he cannot see.

His observation is good data. It is simply not the same category of thing as the table, and it is not competing with it in the way it feels like it is.

The table is not a claim about what the water looks like at twenty past eleven from where he is standing. It is a claim about the tide. And the tide and the appearance of the water at one spot on one morning are related but they are not the same object, and a man can be entirely right about the second and entirely wrong to conclude anything about the first.

You have been treating an accurate observation as though it settled a different question. The written word calls the testimony sure and puts its work on people who cannot assess it, and the Spirit of God is the one making it hold, never the sharpness of anybody's eyes.

And there is no key here and no method. Nothing on this page is a technique for overriding what you can see, because a technique can be performed badly, and the failing of it would land on a man out on sand where the failing of things lands hard.