The Mooring in the Fog

Nobody rang. That is the part she still turns over.

She did not leave. There was no row, no letter, no crisis of faith on a hillside. There was a hard winter and a bad rota at work, and she missed three Sundays in a row, and then missing became the shape of the thing. By the spring she had stopped saying she would be back. By the autumn she had stopped thinking about it on a Sunday at all, except sometimes at about half eleven, briefly, the way you notice a road you used to drive.

That was four years ago and she is thirty-eight and she is standing on the harbor wall in the fog with a flask, because she comes down here when she cannot sleep, and this morning she cannot see the water.

She can hear it. She can hear the boats knocking gently against each other somewhere out there, and a rope creaking, and one of the gulls doing its awful noise up on the wall. But the fog is right down on it and she cannot see a single mast, and there is something about not being able to see the boats that is doing something to her chest that she does not want to look at directly.

Because here is what she thinks about herself and has never said out loud to one person. She thinks she came loose. Not that she rebelled, not that she rejected anything. She thinks that whatever held her got quietly worn through by four years of not thinking about it, and that she has drifted out on the tide, slowly, in the fog, without ever noticing the moment, and that if she went back now she would be going back as a visitor.

That is not a small fear and it deserves better than a slogan.

And it may be yours. Maybe there was no harbor and no fog. But you stopped, and nobody rang, and you have quietly assumed that stopping was the same as coming loose.

The boat moves. That is what a moored boat does.

Let me name the pit gently, because a fear like this has usually been kept warm and private for a long time.

Underneath it is a picture, and the picture is doing all the damage. The picture is of a rope, and of the rope being what holds you, and of the rope wearing through by neglect. It feels honest. It feels like taking responsibility. And it puts the whole weight of your standing on the one thing in the harbor that was always going to fray.

Now here is the letter to the Hebrews, written to people who had gone quiet, describing hope with the same picture and putting the weight somewhere else entirely.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.Hebrews 6:19

Read where the anchor is. Not in your hands. Not on the deck. It entereth into that within the veil, which is the holy of holies, which is where Christ Himself has gone. The far end of your hope is fastened inside the sanctuary of God, and Jesus is named a few words later as the one who went in there ahead of us.

You are held at the far end by an anchor that is already sure and steadfast, and it was fastened where the weather cannot get at it. I am not putting a brave face on four quiet years. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a picture given to people who had gone quiet and lays it under a woman on a harbor wall.

Fog is not distance

Here is the thing about a fog, and anyone who has stood on that wall knows it.

The fog does not move the boats. It removes the view. Every one of those hulls is exactly where it was last Tuesday, on exactly the same mooring, and the chain running down into the mud is doing exactly what a chain does. She cannot see it. Not being able to see it has never once been the same as it not being there, and she knows that about boats and has never once applied it to herself.

Four years of not thinking about God is a fog. It is a real fog and it is not nothing. But it is a visibility problem and you have been reading it as a position problem.

You have not been quietly relocated by your own silence, and you are still exactly where His work put you, and it is already fastened. Scripture says He is faithful even when we are faithless, because He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that written line true through a winter when nobody rang.

Who holds which end

And now the part I would want said to me on that wall.

The reason her picture hurts so much is that in it she is holding the rope. So the strength of the connection is the strength of her grip, and she knows exactly how weak her grip has been.

But look at the letter again. The anchor is not in her hands at all. Somebody else's hand is at that end. Jesus is called the forerunner who entered for us. He went in and it is His holding, and the sureness of it is His sureness rather than a report on her attendance.

You are held by His hand and not your own, and it is already done, and He was holding on through every Sunday you did not think about at half eleven. It is written that He is able to keep that which is committed unto Him (2 Timothy 1:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old promise about keeping arrive in the fog as something you can lean on.