Out Is A Place You Have To Learn

Six in the morning, eleven weeks out, and Dov is standing in the middle of a rented kitchen with nothing to do.

That is the whole scene. There is a kettle. There is one mug on the counter with a ring in the bottom of it. There is a bag of clothes on a chair because he has not worked out where clothes go in a room like this, and there is a phone on the windowsill with four numbers in it, and one of them is the man who came and got him.

He is out. Everybody has said so. Two people said the word miracle and they were not exaggerating and he knows they were not, because he was there, and he knows exactly what he could and could not have done for himself, and he could not have done it.

And here he is at six in the morning, out, with absolutely no idea how to be a person who is out.

Nobody warned him about this part. Every story he had ever heard ended at the water's edge. Somebody goes under, somebody goes in after them, they come up on the bank coughing, and that is where the telling stops and the room goes warm. Nobody ever told him what a Tuesday looks like on the bank. Nobody said that the bank has a gas bill on it, and a body that does not sleep right yet, and long stretches of hours with nothing in them, and a silence where the old life used to be making all that noise.

He has caught himself thinking a thing he would not say out loud. He has caught himself thinking that at least in there he knew what he was doing.

If you have thought that, hear me carefully. That is not a betrayal of the rescue. That is a man learning a new country, and the new country is quiet, and quiet is very loud after years of noise.

You are out. Out is not a feeling that arrived with you. Out is a place, and you have never lived here before, and nobody is born knowing the ordinary shape of a day.

He did two things, not one

There is a line in the psalms that people quote half of.

He drew me up out of the pit of mire and mud, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps firm.Psalm 40:2

The half everybody quotes is the first half. Drew me up. Out of the pit. That is the part that gets told at tables and it should be, because it is the part where God comes in after somebody who could not climb.

But read what He did next, because it is a separate act and it is the one you need this morning.

He set the feet on rock. And then, and this is a different verb again, He made the steps firm.

Three things, in order. Lifted out. Stood up. Steadied while walking.

The lifting is over. That already happened and it happened to you, not by you, and nobody can take it off you. The standing has happened too, or you would not be upright in a kitchen at six in the morning wondering what to do with a mug.

The third one is the one you are in the middle of, and it is not a mopping-up exercise. It is written down as its own act of God. He does not haul a person out of a pit and then leave them to work out walking on their own as some sort of test. The steadying of the steps is His work, done by His Spirit, and it is happening in the eleventh week, in the quiet, on a floor with a bag of clothes on a chair.

This is what I want you to hear more than anything else on this page. You are not in the boring part after the miracle. You are in the second half of the same rescue, Psalm 40:2 gives the steadying a verb of its own, and the Holy Spirit is not one bit less present in it than He was in the lifting. He is just quieter about it, because the steadying of a step is a small motion and it happens under your foot rather than in the sky.

The reason nobody warned you is that the steadying does not photograph. It has no bank, no coughing, no shout, no moment. It is a man washing one mug. It is a woman making a phone call she has put off for nine days. It is a person putting clothes into a drawer at last, and the drawer sticks, and that is the whole event.

And here is the part that people who have never been under the water get wrong. They think that if the aftermath is hard, the rescue must have been incomplete. It was not. The rescue was total, and it is written that way, finished, with nothing left owing on it. The aftermath is hard because you are alive, and being alive takes learning, and the Holy Spirit did not hand you a fraudulent version of your freedom because your Tuesday is difficult.

The going back in, when it happens to people, almost never happens at the waterline. It happens on the bank, in the eleventh week, at six in the morning, when a person decides that not knowing how to live out here is proof they were never really out.

You are really out. Psalm 40:2 says He set the feet and then made the steps firm, and the Holy Spirit is doing that second half in you this morning. You did not get here by yourself and you are not staying here by yourself either.

One plain thing now, said the way I would say it on the porch. If being out has got dark enough that you have had thoughts of not being here at all, tell a living person tonight. A friend, a doctor, an emergency line. In the United States you can call or text 988 and somebody will answer. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line will do it. Scripture never once treats that as a failure of faith, and the Holy Spirit is not disappointed in a person who reaches for a hand. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and taking hold of one of them is obedience, not defeat.