I Sat On The Side And Watched

There is a list and it has never been written down.

Swimming came off it first, probably. Then rain, in the sense of going out in it rather than sheltering from it. Then anything at the beach beyond the knees. Then that thing at the pool with the girls from work. Then the sea on holiday, which you now sit beside and enjoy, and everybody believes you.

Nobody decided any of that. There was never a day when a woman sat down and removed swimming from her life. Each one came off separately, with a reason that was true at the time, and the reasons were all good ones.

But the list is quite long now.

And I want to do the thing nobody has done, which is to look at the whole of it at once rather than at the individual items.

Because item by item, every single one of those is nothing. A missed swim is nothing. A rainy afternoon indoors is nothing.

All of them together is a life with the water taken out of it.

What comes off a list first

Here is what I have noticed about how these lists get built, and it is worth knowing.

The things that come off first are the ones with joy in them.

Not the obligations. Obligations stay, because somebody is expecting you. The school run stays. Work stays. The visits stay.

What comes off is the swimming, the getting caught in the rain, the sitting in the sea, the running about. Every one of those is optional, which means every one of those is available to be quietly declined without anybody noticing.

So the list is not random. It is made entirely of the pleasant things, and the reason is that nobody complains when a pleasant thing goes.

You are losing only the things that nobody will miss on your behalf, and no obligation has ever once come off that list. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what a list is actually made of, and John 5 has somebody asked a question that nobody had thought to ask a man in thirty eight years.

And here is the second thing, which is about the children.

They have seen it. Not as a subject and not as a sentence, but as a fact about how holidays go.

And what they have learned, without a word being spoken, is that a woman past a certain age sits beside the water. That is now in them, and it went in the way everything goes into a child, by observation and repetition and nothing else.

You are teaching something at every beach without saying one word, and no lesson has ever once needed a sentence to be learned. Scripture in John 5 has a man asked whether he wants to be made whole, and the Spirit of God is the one who asks a woman a question nobody has put to her.

Wilt thou be made whole

There is a man by a pool in John 5 who has been there thirty eight years, and Jesus asks him something that sounds almost rude.

When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? (John 5:6, King James Version)

Wilt thou be made whole.

It is a strange question to ask somebody who has been lying by a healing pool for thirty eight years. The answer looks obvious, and Jesus asks anyway, and He does not usually ask things He does not need to ask.

Here is why I think He asks. Thirty eight years is long enough for a condition to become an arrangement. There is a life built around it by then. There are places you sit and things you have stopped expecting, and a man in that position has to be asked, because he may genuinely not have considered it recently.

You are being asked something nobody has put to you, and no arrangement of thirty eight years has ever once been examined without a question. It is written in John 5 that He saith unto him, wilt thou be made whole, and the Holy Spirit is the one who asks a woman a question that has not come up in years.

And notice what the man does not do.

He does not say yes. He explains. He says he has no man to put him into the pool, and that somebody else always gets there first, and every word of it is true and reasonable and is not an answer.

That is what a long arrangement does. It turns a question about wanting into an explanation of why not, automatically, before the wanting has had a chance to speak.

You are able to notice an explanation arriving where an answer should be, and it has never once been the same thing as a no. The Spirit of God is what gets underneath an explanation to the wanting, and the written word says wilt thou be made whole.

One thing off the list

So here is the assignment, and it is exactly one item.

Do one thing this week that has been getting skipped, and let your face get wet.

Not swimming, necessarily. Take the smallest thing on the list. Walk in the rain to the mailbox and back without an umbrella. Put your face under the shower properly instead of angling away from it. Go into the sea to your waist.

The wet is the point. It is the specific thing that has been avoided, and it is why the list has the shape it has.

Two things about it.

Nobody has to be there. This does not have to be public and there is no version of this that requires an audience.

And do not look afterward. That is the correction and it would put the whole thing back where it was. Get wet, get dry, and go and do something else.

You are able to take one item back off that list, and it has never once been the case that a whole category had to go. The written word in John 5 asks a man whether he wants to be made whole, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one wet face into care rather than into a demonstration.