The Wind Turned At The Point

The wind swings around and comes at him from the other side, and he is out on the point with nothing between him and it, and the sentence lands.

Late in the day. The kind of light that makes the water look like something you could walk on for about four minutes and then stops. Grass laid flat in one direction, going silver where it moves. Two birds out over the water holding position without any effort at all, which is a thing they do that never stops being remarkable.

He came out here because there is nothing out here. That is the whole reason. Not to think. Precisely not to think. He came out here because a headland in a wind is a place where nothing can get a word in.

And then the wind turns, the way it does at the point, coming round about ninety degrees over the space of a minute, and everything changes direction at once, and in the middle of that, with no warning and no reason, the thing he has been outrunning for eleven days arrives and sits down in him.

There is nothing to get behind.

That is the fact of it. There is no wall out here, no door to shut, no room to leave, no task to pick up, no person to talk to, no reason to look at a screen. He is standing on a headland with grass going silver in every direction and the thing is here with him and there is not one physical object between them.

He does not sit down. He stands there. The birds hold their position.

That is you, and your headland might be a bus with twenty minutes left, a bed at three in the morning, a waiting room, a Sunday afternoon with nothing in it.

Before anything else. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and nothing here is going to tell you that a thought arriving is a spiritual condition. That is not mine to say and it would not be true. If thoughts have been landing like this often, or if any of it has taken you somewhere darker, tell one person today who can act: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will walk out to a point with you. And whatever sat down beside you out on that point, it is not a person. Scripture is flat that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and out here, where there is nobody at all to blame, that turns out to be easier to see than it is anywhere else.

And nothing here is a ritual. There is no sequence on this page you could get wrong, because a thing that can be got wrong is no use whatsoever to a man standing in the open.

Isaiah names four things and every one of them is a Person

There is a verse in Isaiah that stacks up shelter images one after another, and the reason it stacks them is that no single one of them is enough.

For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.Isaiah 25:4

Read the grammar. Every single one of those is thou hast been. Not thou hast provided. Not thou hast built. He is not describing structures that God supplies. He is naming what God has been, personally, in the position of.

A strength. A refuge. A shadow.

And that is the whole thing for a man on a headland, because a structure has to be reached and a Person can be where you already are. There is no wall out on that point. There is not going to be a wall. What the verse offers is not a wall, and that is not a downgrade, it is the only thing that could possibly work in the open.

You are in the open with somebody who has been the refuge itself, not the builder of one. That is not a comfort out on a point: Isaiah 25:4 puts every shelter word in the completed tense and makes each of them a description of God rather than a thing He hands over, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a present thing present in a body with nothing to get behind rather than the amount of ground anybody can find on a headland.

The open is not the failure

Here is the thing that needs saying plainly, because a man out on a point will conclude the wrong thing about himself.

Being caught in the open is not a mistake. He did not fail to prepare. There is no arrangement of a life in which a person is never out where nothing can be got behind, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling a wall that does not exist.

And notice what the verse says about the storm: as a storm against the wall. Even in the image, the wall is the thing being hit. Walls are not exempt. The strength and the refuge and the shadow are named separately from the wall on purpose, because the wall is not what does the sheltering in that sentence.

So the open is not a lapse in your defenses. It is where everybody lives some of the time, and it is precisely the place this verse was written for.

You have not been caught out, and nothing about eleven days of outrunning it was a failure. The written word names God Himself as the refuge and puts the wall on the receiving end of the storm, and the Spirit of God has been out on that headland in the same wind, never a technique performed correctly in the open.

So there is one line here, and it is not a formula and it does not fail if the wind takes half of it. Thou hast been a refuge. Or: He is the shelter and there is no wall. Said out loud, into a wind, where nobody can hear it. The words are not doing the sheltering. Somebody is noticing out loud what has already been true.

You have never once needed a wall in order to be covered. Scripture makes the refuge a Person and states it in the completed tense, and the Spirit of God has been standing in the open every time you have been standing in it.