The Buoy With a Name On It

Morag does the moorings list on the last Friday of the month, and it takes about forty minutes and she has never once done it in forty minutes because everybody who walks along that wall wants to talk to her.

It is a small harbor. Thirty-one moorings, and she can tell you every one of them from the wall without looking at the clipboard, which is why the clipboard mostly stays under her arm. Boats in, boats out, one gone to Kirkwall for a refit, two that have not moved in three years and their owners know it.

And number nineteen, out in the near channel, empty since March, with a fresh painted buoy on it and a name.

People ask her. Every single week somebody asks her, usually a visitor, sometimes a local who ought to know better. That one is free, then. And she says the same six words she has said since March. No. That one is spoken for.

There is no boat. The boat is in a shed two hundred miles south with about a third of her planking on, and she will not be in the water before April, and there are photographs of her on somebody's phone looking like a whale skeleton. The buoy went down in March with her name already on it, in green, because a mooring has to be allocated before a boat is delivered or there is nowhere to deliver it to.

An empty mooring, all summer, in the best part of the channel, and nobody may tie up there.

Morag is fifty-nine and she has been coming out to this wall since she was a child and she does not, as a rule, have large thoughts about herself. But this afternoon there is a particular quality to the light, and she is looking at number nineteen, and something old turns over in her.

She has been in and around church her whole life, and the word holy has always sounded to her like a role you have to grow into. A purpose. Something you demonstrate, over years, until people can look at your life and see what you were for. And she has looked at her own life quite honestly, at fifty-nine, on a wall, and thought: I never demonstrated anything. I raised two children and kept a list and made an enormous number of cups of tea.

And there is a mooring in front of her, in the good water, holding a place all summer for something that has never floated.

You have stood on that wall. Your list is different from hers. But you know the sound of the word purpose arriving like a bill, and you know how carefully you have avoided adding up what you have actually demonstrated.

Paul writes it from a cell, near the end

This is the last letter Paul writes, to a young man he loves, and there is nothing decorative in it. He is not building a case. He is handing over what he has.

Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.2 Timothy 1:9

An holy calling. The adjective is on the calling. Read that twice, because your whole life you have put the adjective on the person and then measured the person. Paul puts it on the calling, which is a thing issued, by somebody, to somebody.

And then he does the thing he does, which is to close every exit. Not according to our works. That is not a hint. That is a door being shut and locked and the key handed to God, and it is put in negative form precisely so that nobody can smuggle a small amount of works in round the side.

You were called with a holy calling, and your works are not in the sentence anywhere. That is the written word and not my consolation on a wall, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line out of a cell in Rome and lays it across thirty-one moorings on a Friday afternoon.

Then the positive half, which is the one I want you to carry. But according to his own purpose and grace. His own purpose. The purpose is His, held by Him, drawn up by Him, and your part in it is to be the one it is for.

A mooring is allocated by the person with the chart, according to the plan, before the boat exists. The plan is not a comment on the boat.

The purpose was never a performance you owe

Here is where this word has done the most quiet damage, and I want to say it plainly because you are fifty-nine, or thirty, or seventy-one, and you have been carrying it a long time.

You heard purpose and you heard debt. Something you owe the world in return for being here. Something you have to show, in a life, so that at the end somebody can say what you were for. And every year that goes by without a visible demonstration has felt like interest accruing on an account you never opened.

Paul says the purpose is His own. Not assigned to you as homework. Held by Him, and you are inside it. The buoy is not being asked to justify the mooring.

This is yours, and it was held for you rather than earned by you, and the water under it is the best in the channel. Second Timothy 1 says according to his own purpose in so many words, and the same Spirit who moved a man in chains to write it is the one making it a present fact on a stone wall in the late light.

I will guard it. I am not saying a life makes no difference or that nothing is asked of you. Paul asks Timothy for a great deal in the next four chapters. I am saying that the allocation came first, and it came in March, and no summer of nothing happening has released that mooring to anyone else. That is not a smaller thing than the purpose you were carrying. It is a great deal larger, and you are not holding it up.