The Boat Under the Tarp

The wind came round to the north at about two and did what it does on that side of the hill, and by half past three the cover was somewhere in the field.

Elin comes out at seven in her father's coat with a mug she has not drunk from, and stands in the yard, and looks at the boat.

It has been on that trailer for eleven years and she has not seen it in any of them.

Her father built it. That is the short version and it is the only version she gives. He built it over three winters in a shed that is not there any more, and it went in the water for about nine years, and then he was ill and then he was gone, and the boat came up here on a borrowed trailer in the spring after the funeral and a cover went over it.

She has said, every single spring, that she is going to deal with it. She says it to herself in April and she means it in April.

Eleven Aprils.

And here is the specific and slightly shameful thing that she has never admitted even in her own head until this exact minute, standing in a wet yard at seven in the morning: she has never lifted the cover. Not once. Not to look. Not to check whether the rain has got in, not to see if the trailer tires are gone, not for any practical reason at all, and she has walked past it roughly four thousand times.

Now the wind has done it for her.

And it is a boat.

It is faded. The varnish has gone chalky on the top strakes. There is rot in one plank near the stern, one, that a person who knew what they were doing could take out in a day. The name is still legible. It is a fifteen foot wooden boat that has been under a cover for eleven years and it is, in every respect, exactly what a fifteen foot wooden boat under a cover for eleven years would be.

She stands there in her father's coat and understands that the eleven years were never about the condition of the boat. They were about not looking.

You have that cover. Yours is not in a yard and it is not a boat and I am not going to guess what it is. But you know how long it has been on, and you know how many times you have walked past it without once lifting a corner.

Paul stops to make allowance before he asks for anything

There is a verse in Romans 6 that everybody quotes the second half of, and the first half of it is the pastoral one, and it is the reason this passage is safe to stand in this morning.

I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.Romans 6:19

I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh.

Stop there. That is Paul apologizing, mid-argument, for using a simple picture, and telling them why he is using it: because they are worn out and he knows it.

That is an enormous thing to find at the front of a verse about yielding. Before he asks them for anything, he makes an allowance for the state they are in. God, through him, adjusts the language downward on purpose because the people reading it are tired.

You are being asked by Someone who made allowance for your condition before He asked. That is the written word and not my gentleness in a wet yard, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a mid-argument aside from a letter to Rome and lays it in front of a boat on a trailer at seven in the morning.

If you have been braced for a hard word this morning, that is the first thing to see: the verse opens by taking your tiredness into account.

Even so now

Now the phrase in the middle, which is the mechanism.

Even so now yield your members.

Even so. Meaning: in the same way. The same faculties, the same capacities, the same members that have been going one direction, turned and pointed another.

Not removed. Not destroyed. Redirected.

That matters here more than almost anything else, because part of what has kept the cover on is a suspicion that yielding means losing. That whatever is under there gets taken away and disposed of and you are left with a gap in the yard where it used to be.

Paul's picture is not disposal. It is redirection: the same thing, now serving something else. And look where he says it goes.

Unto holiness.

That is the destination of the whole sentence. Not unto emptiness, not unto a smaller life. Unto the word this whole site is about, which means set apart for God, which means the thing under the cover ends up belonging to Him rather than ending up in a heap.

This is yours, and what is yielded is redirected and never disposed of, and it is already settled. Romans 6 says even so now and unto holiness in the same breath, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to make allowance for tired readers is the one making it a present fact in a woman standing in her father's coat.

Let me guard it properly.

I have not guessed what is under your cover. There is no list in this article and there never was.

And you have not lost anything by eleven years. There is no penalty here, no reduced portion for a woman who has said she would deal with it every April since 2015. God is not tapping His foot in that yard. If you cannot lift it today, He is not colder about you tomorrow and this article is not a deadline.

And I am not going to tell you what is under yours or what it looks like. Elin's turned out to be an ordinary boat with one rotten plank. Yours may be harder than that, and if it is, the verse still opens with an allowance for the state you are in.