In to the Knees and No Further

Seven in the evening at the far end of the lake, which is the end you have to walk round to, and the water has been warm since about four.

There are five of them and two towels between them, which is going to be a problem later and nobody has thought about it.

Freya is twenty-two and she is in to her knees.

She has been in to her knees for about eleven minutes. She is enjoying it. She is having the conversation, she is laughing at the right things, she has kicked water at somebody. From the bank you would say she is swimming with her friends.

She is not swimming. She is standing in a lake with her arms folded and the water at the top of her calves, and she has been doing exactly this in every body of water she has ever been in since she was about fourteen.

It is not a fear of water. She swims perfectly well. She did lessons, she can do a length of front crawl without stopping, she is not frightened. It is a habit that started somewhere she cannot locate and hardened into a way of being at a lake, and if you asked her she would tell you she just likes it here, which is true, and is also not the whole thing.

And there is something else, which she has never said out loud to any living person, and which arrives every single time she stands in water like this.

There is one part of her life she does exactly this with.

She is not holding out on God in general. That is what makes it hard to talk about. She is in. She gets up early, she means it, she has made decisions that cost her something real and she made them gladly. Nobody looking at her from the bank would say she is standing in the shallows.

There is one thing. And she has never told anybody what it is, and I am not going to guess at it, and this article never will.

Kaia swims out. Just goes, mid-conversation, twenty strokes maybe, and turns round out where the water goes from brown-green to properly dark, and treads water, and calls something back.

And Freya hears her perfectly.

That is the thing that catches her. She can hear every word. Kaia is not far away. From the shallows it looks like another country, and it is about eleven strokes.

You have that line on you. Yours is at a different depth. But you know exactly where it is, and you know that you are genuinely in, and that there is one thing you have never taken past it.

He tells a professional something about location

Luke 5 is early, and the scene is a borrowed boat and a crowd on the shore and a fisherman who has been up all night for nothing.

Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.Luke 5:4

Consider who is speaking and who is being spoken to. A carpenter is giving fishing instructions to a man who fishes for a living, on that man's own lake, at the wrong time of day, after a night that produced nothing.

And consider what the instruction actually is. It is not, believe harder. It is not, feel differently about last night. It is a direction and a distance: go further out, and put the net down.

You have been given an instruction about a location and not about a feeling. That is the written word and not my encouragement in the shallows, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an exchange in a fishing boat and lays it on a lake shore at seven in the evening.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else in this. You have been waiting to be persuaded. You have been waiting for the day when the thing you are holding stops mattering to you, or the day you feel settled enough about handing it over, and that day has been a long time coming, and I do not think it is on the way.

Peter did not get persuaded either. Read what he actually says.

At thy word

Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is in five words. At thy word.

He is not convinced. He says so first, out loud, in a slightly flat voice: we have been at this all night and there is nothing there. He does not pretend to a confidence he does not have, and Jesus does not require him to.

He moves on a word rather than on a conviction. Those are two different engines and only one of them was ever available to him at four in the morning.

You are able to move on a word rather than on a feeling, and it is already yours to do, right now, as you read. Luke 5 has him say nevertheless at thy word in exactly that order, and the same Spirit who was on Christ at that lake is the one making it a present fact in a young woman with the water at the top of her calves.

Now let me guard this carefully, because this category is the one where a writer can do real damage in a sentence.

I do not know what your thing is. I have not guessed and I will not, and if you have been braced for a list of likely candidates you can stop bracing, because this article does not have one and never did.

And you have not forfeited anything by holding it this long. That needs saying plainly. There is no clock on this and no reduced offer for late arrivals, and God has not been standing at the edge of your lake for eleven years getting colder about it. Some of you will read this and not be ready, and He is not finished with you and neither is this message.

What I am telling you is only what the passage says: the instruction was about distance, the fisherman was not persuaded, and he moved anyway on the strength of a word rather than a feeling.