The Face In The Wheelhouse Glass

Saturday, and the job on the phone says wash down and polish, two hours, harbor side.

He knows the boat before he gets to it. Forty feet of white plastic with a name across the back that is somebody's joke about their job in the city, and it goes out perhaps six times a year, and it sits on the pontoon where his father used to tie up.

He is good at it. That is the thing. He does the deck properly, he coils the ropes the way his hands learned to coil them when he was eleven, and he leaves the wheelhouse cleaner than the owner has ever seen it.

He is halfway through the glass when he catches his own face in it.

And he stops. Not because of the lines round his eyes, because he has had those a while. It is the mouth. Set flat, pulled down at one corner, the mouth of a man who has been chewing on something for a long time and has never once swallowed it.

He knows exactly when it started, too. It was not the day the boats went. It was about two years after that, on a morning when the phone did not ping until half past eleven and he stood in his own kitchen and understood that this was not a bad patch. This was the arrangement now.

He said something that morning. In his head, not out loud, and never to a living soul since. One sentence, aimed straight up, and he has carried it about with him ever since the way a man carries a stone in a coat pocket.

He does not pray it. He would not dream of praying it. You do not say a thing like that to God.

So he finishes the glass. He texts the owner that the boat is done. He walks home past a harbor full of other people's boats, saying good afternoon to everyone he passes, and inside he is precisely as hard as he was when he started.

You have your own sentence. I know you do, because nobody carrying nothing reads this far down a page like this one. So bring it in here with you, and before we go one step further, take my word for this: there is not one line in this article that is going to tell you off for it.

Nobody in here is going to tell you off

Let me say the thing you have been waiting a long while for somebody to say.

You are not in trouble. Not with me, and not with God. I am not saying it to be pleasant to you either, I am saying it because Scripture is stacked from end to end with people who said far worse than your sentence straight to His face and were kept, and because the Holy Spirit has never once required a person to be tidied up before He would come near them.

Here is why the telling off usually happens, and it is worth understanding, because it will stop you flinching next time. Bitterness frightens people. When you say the hard thing out loud, the person listening feels the ground move, and correcting you is the fastest way for them to get their own footing back. So out comes the lecture, and it was never about you at all. It was about their discomfort.

I am also not going to ask you to repent of it before we begin. That is not me being casual with anything. It is that God has never made a person's honesty conditional on their attitude being right first, and every attempt to run it the other way round has produced exactly what it produced in you: a polite man on a pontoon with a stone in his pocket.

The man who spoke in the bitterness of his soul

There is a book in the Bible where a man loses everything, and his friends turn up, and for chapter after chapter they explain God to him.

They are careful, they are reverent, and every one of them is doing what people have done to you: making the silence make sense so that they can bear it. And in the middle of it, the man says this.

Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.Job 7:11

Read the plain words there. Not I will bring my concerns before the Lord. Complain, in the bitterness of my soul, and I am not keeping my mouth shut about it.

Now go to the end of the book, because the ending is the part almost nobody quotes. God speaks at last, and the first thing He does is turn to the careful, reverent friends and tell them they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has (Job 42:7).

Sit down with that for a second. The men who defended God with tidy explanations were the ones corrected. The man who complained in the bitterness of his soul is the one God said had spoken rightly about Him.

You are not going to shock Him with your sentence. He has heard it already, He heard it the morning you thought it in your kitchen, and the same Spirit who kept Job's verdict standing in the written word kept it there precisely so that no hard man in any century would believe the door had shut on him.

Who is doing the softening

There is a woman in Scripture who came home empty and told the whole town to stop using her name.

Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.Ruth 1:20

Notice what is not attached to that verse. No correction. No footnote about her needing to work on her heart. God let her sentence go into the book in her own words, and the word she chose for what He had done to her was bitterly. I am not offering you the rest of her story as a preview of yours, because I have no idea what your story does next, and nobody who tells you otherwise is telling you the truth. I am showing you what God does with a bitter sentence when He hears one. He writes it down and He keeps the woman.

Then there is what He says He does about hardness, and every verb in it belongs to Him.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

He takes out. He puts in. He gives. There is no clause anywhere in that sentence where the person softens themselves first as a condition of being handed anything, and there is no clause where they apologize for how the stone got there.

So you have this settled today, and it is not a reward for a better attitude: God is not put off by how hard this has made you. The written word says He is the one who does the taking out, and His Spirit is already at work on ground you had privately written off.