The Water Is an Hour Away

It is fifty eight minutes if the road is clear and he knows that to the minute because he used to check.

He has not gone since February.

That is the strange fact of the last nine months and he has never explained it to anybody, including the two people who have asked. The water is an hour away. It has steadied him his whole life. His father took him there. It is the place he went the week his marriage nearly came apart and the place he went when his daughter was born, and it has never once failed to do something to him.

And he has not gone since February, and the reason is not laziness and it is not busyness.

He has not gone because he already knows.

That is the whole of it. Sometime in the winter he became certain, in a way he cannot argue himself out of, that if he drove out there now it would be beautiful and it would do nothing, and that knowing would be worse than not going.

So the road out is still there. The turnoff is still there. And he stays inland, and he is aware every single week that he is choosing not to test something.

He is forty one.

The sentence, unsaid: I would rather keep the water than find out it does not reach me.

You may know that road. The last reliable thing, and the reason you have stopped going.

He puts the new thing in the desert

There is a line in Isaiah that is quoted constantly and almost always with the location edited out.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

Everybody remembers the new thing. Read where He puts it.

A way in the wilderness. Rivers in the desert. Not a way out of the wilderness, and not rivers instead of the desert. The location is named twice and it is the same location both times, and the whole promise is about something arriving where the person already is.

You are being met in the dry place rather than moved out of it, and Isaiah 43:19 puts the way in the wilderness and the rivers in the desert rather than promising an exit from either, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a line written to people in exile and lands it on a man who has not driven to the coast since February.

Now it shall spring forth

Consider the small phrase in the middle, because it is the one that argues with him.

Now it shall spring forth. Not when conditions improve. Not once the man has got himself back to the place that used to work. Now, in the desert, in the wilderness, on the current terrain.

And then a question, which is unusual for a promise. Shall ye not know it? God asks whether they will notice, which implies that this new thing is the kind that can be missed, and that missing it is a live possibility rather than an insult.

You are being asked whether you will notice rather than whether you deserve it, because the written word attaches a question about perception to the promise rather than a condition about worthiness, and His Spirit is what turns that from a rhetorical flourish into something a man can hold inland.

And notice what a way in the wilderness is for. It is for going somewhere. It is not scenery and it is not comfort. God is describing infrastructure in a place that has none, which is a strange and practical thing to promise a person who has stopped traveling.

You are being given a road and not a view, and Isaiah 43 promises a way rather than a better landscape, and the same Spirit who spoke it over a desert road is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Nine months of avoiding the one thing that has always steadied him, because he is protecting himself from finding out, is a real weight and it is the kind that hides well behind a busy life. Tell a doctor plainly what the last nine months have been like, including the fact that he has stopped going, because avoidance of a thing that used to help is a well recognized signal and not a character flaw. Ask about a counselor, and tell them the true sentence about preferring not to find out. And tell one friend, ideally one of the two who asked, why he has not been out there.

And if the flatness has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it out loud is not losing the water. You are held exactly as much in the month you say it as in the nine you did not, because Isaiah 43:19 puts the rivers in the desert rather than at the end of a drive, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in a promise.