The Beach Is Still There

He drove out there again in June, which makes four times in eleven years.

Same road, same turnoff, same long walk down through the grass, and he stood in the spot. He is confident it is the spot. There is a rock formation he uses and the angle of it is right, and he stood there for about an hour and a half.

The first time it happened he was twenty three. He had walked down there in the early morning with nothing particular in mind and something came over him standing at the edge of the water, and he stayed there until the sun was properly up and he drove home a different person and he means that.

The four return visits have all gone the same way.

He gets there. It is beautiful, because it is always beautiful. He stands in the place. He waits, and he tries not to be waiting, which does not work. And after a while he gets self conscious about a man standing alone on a beach and he walks back up to the truck, and the drive home is quiet in a way that is difficult to describe to anybody.

He is thirty four now. He has never told a soul that he goes.

What he has worked out, over eleven years and four trips, is a conclusion he cannot get around by wanting to. It is not superstition, exactly. It is closer to grief.

The sentence, if he said it, would be: whatever that was, it belonged to that morning and to that piece of sand, and I cannot get back into it.

You may have your own stretch of coast. The place you go back to and stand in and come home from.

Water where there is no reason for water

There is a line in Isaiah that goes out of its way to name the wrong places, and the wrongness is the whole point of it.

I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys: I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.Isaiah 41:18

Read the geography. Rivers in high places. High ground does not hold water; water runs off it, which is the first thing anybody learns about hills. Pools in the wilderness. Springs in dry land. Every single location named is one where water has no business being.

That is not decoration. The prophet is making one claim four times: God is not limited by whether a place is the sort of place where this normally happens.

You are dealing with a God who opens water on high ground, and Isaiah 41:18 lists four locations chosen precisely because none of them supplies water on its own, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a promise made to an exhausted people and lands it on a man who has been driving to one beach for eleven years.

The place never had it

Consider what actually happened at twenty three, because he has the causation the wrong way round and it has cost him a decade.

He believes the beach was holding something and that he walked into it. What the verse describes is God opening water in a place, which means the water came to the location rather than out of it, and if that is true then the beach was never a reservoir. It was a spot where something arrived once.

Standing in it again is like going back to where a delivery was made and waiting on the doorstep.

And that explains something about the four trips that has bothered him and that he has never been able to name. Every one of them has felt like an audition. He arrives, he positions himself correctly, he composes his mind, he tries not to try. All of that is the behavior of a man who believes the location is assessing him, and none of it is anywhere in the verse, because a piece of high ground has no opinion about whether it should be given a river.

The morning at twenty three did not happen because he stood in the right rectangle of sand. It happened because God opened something, in a place, on a Tuesday, to a young man who had walked down there with nothing particular in mind.

You have been standing where a delivery landed rather than where it came from, because the written word has God opening rivers rather than places containing them, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from a correction into a set of keys handed over.

And notice the verb He uses. I will open. It is the language of unstopping something, of making a way through where there was none, and the initiative in every clause of that verse is entirely His.

You are not the one who has to find the water, and Isaiah 41 makes God the one who opens and the ground the one that receives, and the same Spirit who spoke that to people in exile speaks it to a man in a truck on a long drive home.

The four trips were not foolish

Now the thing he would be embarrassed about if anybody knew, which is that he has driven three hours each way, four times, to stand on sand.

There is nothing foolish in it. A man who received something real and goes back looking for it is not superstitious, he is hungry, and hunger that drives three hours is not a defect of character.

What is worth putting down is only the conclusion he has drawn from the four quiet drives home. He has read the silence at the beach as a verdict about him, when it is simply information about the beach.

You were never turned away out there, because Isaiah 41:18 never once ties the water to the merits of the ground, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief for a man who has been carrying a private grief about a piece of coastline.