The Cold Water Swimmers at Seven

There are eight of them most mornings and about four when it is genuinely awful, and today is one of the good ones: no wind, flat gray water, the light coming up behind the headland.

They go in at seven. They stay in for as long as anybody stays in. They come out and stand on the shingle in robes and hats making the noise people make, and somebody produces a flask, and for twenty-five minutes there is a conversation on that beach that is the best conversation most of them will have all day.

Rhian is forty-eight and has been coming eighteen months and is entirely part of it, and also is not.

Everyone likes her. That is not in question. She is dependable, she is there in February, she once drove Bev to hospital at six in the morning and stayed. Nobody on that beach has a word to say against her.

But there is a small maneuver that happens on the shingle, and Rhian has begun to notice it, and she has been reading it wrong.

It goes like this. The conversation drifts. Somebody says something about a funeral, or about whether it all means anything, or about their mother, and it goes toward the edge of something. And in the pause, Rhian speaks. And what comes out of Rhian is good. It is well constructed. She did two courses. She can handle the problem of suffering, she can handle whether the manuscripts are reliable, she can handle the thing about the Old Testament, and she can do all of it warmly and without steamrollering anybody.

And every time she does it, the conversation politely closes and moves to the tide times.

She has decided this is because they do not want to hear it. That is the reading she has been carrying for a year, and it has a certain grim comfort in it.

Today she is in the water, chest deep, and Bev is beside her looking at the headland, and Bev says, not to the group, just to her, quite quietly: do you ever get frightened, though. About the whole thing. At night.

And Rhian opens her mouth and finds that she does not have that one in the file.

So she says: yes. Constantly. Usually about half three.

And Bev turns and looks at her properly for the first time in eighteen months, and what follows is twenty minutes standing in the cold that Rhian will still be thinking about in ten years.

You have that file. Yours is a different file, maybe a smaller one. But you know the maneuver, and you know the way a room closes, and you have almost certainly been reading it as opposition.

Paul asks for salt, and salt is a measurement

Colossians ends with a run of practical instructions and two of them are about how you talk to people who do not believe what you believe.

Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.Colossians 4:5-6

Start with the salt, because the salt is the part that has been quietly ignored for two hundred years.

Salt is a seasoning. That is the entire nature of the thing. A meal with the right amount of salt in it does not taste of salt, it tastes of itself, more so. A meal with too much salt in it is inedible and everybody at the table is polite about it and nobody has a second plate.

Paul chose a measured word. He did not say let your speech be full of salt or heavy with salt. Seasoned. Which means the amount is part of the instruction, and an unmeasured version of the right ingredient is not a more obedient version of this verse. It is a different dish.

You have been handed a measure, and the measure is part of what was written. That is the written word and not my read of your beach, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the end of a letter and lays it down in cold water at seven in the morning.

Then the purpose clause, which is the sentence that undoes the file. That ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.

Every man. Not every objection. The unit Paul is working in is people, one at a time, each of whom has to be answered as themselves. A file is organized by objection, which is why it can be prepared in advance, and that is exactly the difference. You cannot prepare Bev. You can only be standing next to her in November when she says the thing.

Walk in wisdom, which takes a while

And look at the verb in front of it all. Walk in wisdom toward them that are without.

Walk. Not speak. Not answer. A walk is a thing that takes time and happens at a pace and covers ground, and the whole instruction assumes you are going along beside somebody rather than standing in front of them.

Then, redeeming the time. Buying back the opportunity. You cannot buy back a moment you were not present for, and you cannot be present for a moment you have already filled with something excellent.

You are being asked for a walk, and it is already yours, and the walk is where the answer gets asked for. Colossians 4 says walk in wisdom in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who promised to give words in the hour is the one making that a present fact on wet shingle with a flask going round.

Now let me guard this carefully, because I am not asking you to become vague. The answers are not the problem. What you learned is true, and the courses were not wasted, and there will be a February morning when Bev asks about the manuscripts and you will be the only person on that beach who can say anything useful, and that will matter.

The problem is the sequence. You have been answering questions before they are asked, which is the one thing that reliably stops them being asked. The file is not too full. It is too early.

And whoever trained you to be ready meant it well and was not wrong to want you ready. Nobody is on trial. There is a flask, and eight people on a beach, and a woman who asked you a real question in the water.