The Two Pulls on the Same Rope

Saturday morning at the slipway, tide out, and there are six of them getting a boat up that is not going up easily.

There is a winch at the top that works when it feels like it. There is a line on the bow doing most of it, and a second line off to the side, on a bollard, that two men are holding to keep her straight against the slope.

Chuy is on the second line. He is forty-one and he has been coming down here to help on Saturdays for about three years and he is not a boat man and he loves it.

And there is a stretch of about ninety seconds where nothing happens.

Both lines are taut. The winch is taking up. His line is holding hard and his hands are hot and the boat is not moving anywhere at all, and the whole arrangement is just tension.

He says something about it to Efraín on the other end. Something like, we are getting nowhere.

And Efraín, who is about seventy and does not waste a word, says: if it stops pulling back, we have lost her.

And then the winch bites and she comes up eight feet and everybody shouts.

Chuy stands on that slipway with a hot rope in his hands and something has landed in him sideways, and it has nothing to do with the boat.

Because here is what Chuy has been carrying since he came to faith at thirty-four.

There is a war in him. Constantly. It is not dramatic and it does not look like anything from the outside, and it goes on most days: something in him wants one thing and something else in him wants the opposite, and the two of them are at it, and he is tired of it.

And the reading he has put on that, for seven years, is this: if the second thing had actually happened to me, if what they said happened at thirty-four had really happened, there would be one pull by now. A changed man would want one thing. The fact that there are two means one of them is not there, and I know which one I hope it is not, and I have never said any of this to anybody.

Seven years of reading a tension as an absence.

You have that reading. Yours may have a different number of years on it. But you know the war, and you know what you have concluded from the fact that it has not stopped.

Paul describes two parties, present

Galatians 5 is about liberty and the Spirit and it is not a gentle chapter, and in the middle of it Paul says the thing that describes your Tuesday better than you have ever described it yourself.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.Galatians 5:17

Read it as a description of a room rather than a verdict on a person.

There are two named parties in that sentence. The flesh, and the Spirit. And they are described as pulling in opposite directions, against each other, at the same time, in the same person.

Now do the arithmetic your reading has never done.

How many parties were in that room before?

You have two pulls because there are two parties present, and one of them is the Spirit of God. That is the written word and not my encouragement on a slipway, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a description written to a struggling church and lays it on a hot rope on a Saturday morning.

The war is not evidence that the second thing did not happen. The war is the shape of the second thing having happened. There was no contest before, because there was nothing on the other line.

That does not make the war pleasant and it does not make it a good thing in itself, and Paul does not celebrate it. But it does completely undo the reading you have been carrying for seven years, because a contest requires two, and you have been treating the presence of a second party as proof of its absence.

The promise attaches to the walking

Now look at the verse just before it, because it is where the instruction sits and the instruction is a direction rather than a demand for an outcome.

Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

Walk. It is a movement word and an ongoing one, and the promise attaches to it. Not: feel nothing, and then you will know you are His. Not: get to a place where there is one pull. Walk, which is what a person does one step at a time in a direction, with everything else still happening around them.

And two verses later: if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Led. Another movement word, and it is His verb, not yours.

This is yours, and the promise hangs on a walk and never on the absence of the pull, and it is already settled. Galatians 5 says walk in the Spirit in exactly those words, and the same Spirit named eleven times in that chapter is the one making it a present fact in a man holding a line on a slipway.

Let me guard this properly, because this is the category where a careless line does harm.

I am not telling you the war is good or that you should be pleased about it. It is exhausting and Paul says so plainly in the same sentence: ye cannot do the things that ye would. That is an honest and frustrated line and it is in the Bible.

And I am not ranking anything and I am not guessing what yours is. This article does not know and it is not going to speculate.

And this most of all: a stronger pull does not mean a weaker standing. If anything the passage points the other way, because a stronger contest means a second party genuinely present and genuinely pulling, and nowhere in Scripture is the intensity of a man's fight used as a measurement of how much he belongs to God.