Boats Rafted Together

By four in the afternoon there are boats off the town dock four deep, and the harbor sounds like a street.

They come in from nine towns for this. Some of them run six hours to get here. Draggers and gillnetters and a couple of old wooden boats that only ever come out for the festival, and every one of them ties alongside the next, gunwale to gunwale, fenders squeezed flat between the hulls, until what was a lot of separate boats has quietly become one wide wooden floor with water underneath it.

People walk across it. That is the thing that gets you the first time you see it. A woman steps from her own deck onto somebody else's and across two more with a foil pan held up over her head, and nobody looks up, because that is simply how you get to the dock.

There is a band on a flatbed at the head of the wharf. There are two men arguing happily about a hydraulic pump. There is a kid asleep in a life jacket in a wheelhouse with the door open and forty people going past.

Curt is at the end of the last boat in the raft, on his own deck, doing nothing.

He came because his brother-in-law said come, and he tied up out at the far edge where a man can leave when he wants to. He has been here two hours and he has not left, and he has not exactly joined either. He has stood at his rail watching a floor of boats the size of a soccer field and thinking, in the way a man thinks a thing without putting words to it, that he has never in his life been part of anything that big.

His whole life has been sized for small rooms. Four at a table. A crew of three. A shop that never needed more than one van.

Then a man he has never met steps over the rail from the next boat with a coil in his hand and says, hey, you are on the outside, so you carry the fenders on that side, and here, take this line.

And Curt takes it, because you do.

He is holding the outboard end of nine towns tied together.

That is your question too.

You have kept yourself sized for something manageable. You know how to be one of four. And when something enormous goes by, you watch it from a rail, and you assume that whatever it is, it is happening at a scale that does not include you, because nothing in your life so far has ever been at that scale.

You are inside something far larger than the rooms you have measured yourself for. That is not flattery, it is what the written word describes standing before the throne, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a crowd nobody can count feel like it has an edge with your hand on it.

Somebody counted, and then stopped counting

John is shown a scene, and the first thing he tells you about it is that the arithmetic failed.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;Revelation 7:9

A multitude no man could number. Four separate words for where they came from, stacked up as if one would not carry it: nations, kindreds, people, tongues. It is deliberately more than you can hold in your head, and being more than you can hold is the point of the sentence.

Notice also what they are doing, because it is easy to import a picture that is not there. They are standing. Together. Facing one direction, with palm branches in their hands, the way a crowd stands when something has been won. This is a gathering, not a ceremony about anybody's private life.

That is the plain sense of the bride language too, and it is worth saying flatly: in Scripture the bride is the church, a whole people, corporate, the way a nation is called God's own. It is never a private arrangement between Christ and a reader and it is never a romance. What is ahead is a company, and it is enormous.

You are counted into a company that is past counting, and the size of it is not a reason you would be missed out of it. The word puts every nation and tongue in that crowd, and it is His Spirit who joined you to that body long before you could picture it.

The rooms you were sized for

Here is the quiet thing that has been shaping you, and I do not think anybody ever said it to you out loud.

You learned, somewhere early, what size of life was realistic for a man like you. Four at a table. A crew of three. And that lesson did not feel like a wound, it felt like being sensible, which is why it has never been examined.

So when something vast appears, you do not argue with it. You just place yourself outside its edge automatically, the way Curt tied up at the far end where a man can leave.

I am not going to tell you the small rooms were nothing. They were your life and there was real love in them. But they were never the measure of what you are part of.

You have a place in something you did not size and could not have imagined. Scripture names a multitude no one can number and puts a real people in it, and His Spirit is the one who set you among them without asking whether it seemed likely to you.

What is ahead, and what I will not tell you

Let me be careful here, because this is the part where messages like this one usually go wrong.

I am not going to give you a timetable. Not a date, not a season, not a reading of the news. Scripture does not hand that out and I am not going to invent it.

I am also not going to tell you that anything in your circumstances is about to change. That is not mine to say and it never was.

What is ahead is a gathering. That is the whole claim, and it is enough to change how a man stands at a rail. You are expected at something real, and it is not a private wish you invented to get through the week. The word describes it as a standing multitude before the throne, and the Holy Spirit in you is the down payment on it rather than a feeling about it.