The Question I Only Ever Asked The Sea

He sits on the harbor wall with the phone face up on the stone beside him, because the screen is easier to read in the sun that way, and because a job comes through on it or it does not.

There were boats here. He was on them from school, and his father was on them, and the man who sold the ice knew what everybody's week looked like by what came off the deck. Then the trade went. It did not go slowly enough for anyone to plan around it, and it has not come back.

So the work comes off the phone now. A garden to clear before the rain. A wardrobe up two flights with a man he has never met. A van to load in the morning and unload before dark, and then the wall again.

Across the water, a man he sat beside at school is walking the new pontoons with a clipboard under his arm. His firm put them in. His firm maintains them. He is not a bad man and never was, and somehow that is the worst part of it.

The sum starts on its own. It always does. It runs the length of the harbor and back: church since he could walk, prayed about this every week for four years, gave his word and kept it, and the pontoons are his.

He does not say it. He never says it. He says it to the water, which is to say he says it to nobody at all, and the water takes it the way it takes everything else off this harbor.

The phone lights up. A job. He is on his feet and walking before the thought is finished, and the thought stays exactly where he left it, sitting on the wall, facing out.

You know that wall. Yours might be a car park or a kitchen or the top of a stairwell, and the question sitting on it is the same one, and today it is coming off the wall.

The question is allowed in this room

Let me say the thing first, because it has been carried in silence and silence has not been kind to it. The question is why them. Why the man on the pontoon, who does not pray, and why not me, who does.

You are allowed to ask that. Not tolerated while you ask it, and not indulged: allowed. Jeremiah said it straight to God's face in almost those words, why does the way of the wicked prosper (Jeremiah 12:1), and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the question was kept in the written record with the prophet's name still on it, rather than tidied out of the book by somebody who thought it looked bad.

Asaph did the same and went further. He wrote out the whole ledger, line by line, how comfortable they are and how untroubled and how it has all come to them, and then he put the ledger in the songbook. Psalm 73 is not the work of a man who never thought it. It is the work of a man who thought it and carried it in with him.

So have this settled before anything else: you are not on trial in here. God is not offended by the arithmetic running in your head and He is not embarrassed by it either. His word carries a book full of men who ran the same sum and said so to His face, and His Spirit is the one who preserved every honest line of it for you to find on a morning like this one.

What silence does to a question

Here is what happens to a question that is only ever asked to the water. It stops being a question.

Nobody answers it, so after long enough it answers itself, and the answer it gives itself is always about you. A question wants a reply. Denied one for years, it settles, and what it settles into is a verdict: God has favorites, and I am not one of them. Nobody sits down and decides that. It accumulates, quietly, on a wall.

That verdict is not yours to keep, and you are not the man it describes. The written word says plainly that God is not unjust, and that He does not overlook the work you have done and the love you have shown for His name (Hebrews 6:10), and His Spirit bears witness to that in you on the mornings the harbor is saying something else entirely.

The question itself was never the danger. The silence around it is. A question spoken to God stays a question, and a question spoken to nobody hardens into a case, and a case is a thing a man eventually wins, against the only one who has ever been for him.

That is what the silence has been costing, and it is why the asking matters more than the answering.

Your portion is not in another man's yard

The sum is not really about pontoons. Underneath it is a suspicion with a shape: that there is a fixed amount of God's goodness in this town, and somebody else has been handed yours.

There is not, and nobody has.

Asaph found the word for it at the bottom of that same psalm. God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Psalm 73:26). A portion is what is put in front of you at the table, and you have one, handed to you in Christ before this harbor ever emptied. What He gives another man does not come off your plate, because your plate has God Himself on it, and His Spirit is what makes that a fact in you rather than a nice sentence.

And it is not a consolation prize handed to the man who missed out. It was settled long before the boats went, it was untouched by their going, and no contract signed on the far side of this water reaches it.