Out With The Wound Still Open

You go off the shelf of rock the way you have gone off it forty times, and this time the swell drops out from under you and puts your shin across the barnacles on the way down.

You know straight away. Not from the pain, because there is not much yet. From the color of the water.

And now the next set comes through and lifts you back onto the same shelf and takes you off it again, and the third time you stop trying to hold on to the rock, because your hands have got nothing left in them and the rock is the thing doing the cutting.

Two men come off the sand at a dead run.

One of them gets under your arms and the other one gets your knees and they turn you and start moving up the beach with you, and you are shouting at them. That is the part you remember with a strange kind of shame afterwards. You are shouting my leg, my leg, look at my leg, and neither of them looks at your leg. They keep walking. Wet sand, then dry sand, then the soft stuff above the tide line where the walking gets slow and hard, and you can feel how much it is costing them and they do not stop.

They put you down above the line. Somebody folds a jacket under your head. Somebody else is already running for a car.

And only then, only there, does a woman kneel down beside you and open a green box and start on the leg. She works on it for a long time. She is not gentle about it and she is not in a hurry either, and she says almost nothing the whole time except once, when you apologize, and she says do not be silly, and carries on.

But nobody touched that leg in the water. Nobody knelt in the surf with a bandage. Nobody said we cannot lift him until we have got this closed.

And you have spent the years since then trying to get one thing about yourself closed before you would let anybody carry you anywhere.

The order on the beach

There is a sentence in Paul's letter to Rome that tells you exactly what condition the rescued were in at the moment of the rescue, and it is not flattering and it is not meant to be.

For while we were still without strength, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.Romans 5:6

Look at what that verse refuses to leave out. Not while we were improving. Not while we were showing early promise. Without strength, which is a medical word about a body that cannot do anything for itself, and ungodly, which is a word nobody would choose about themselves in a room with other people in it.

And in the middle of that sentence sits the phrase everybody skips. At the right time. The timing was already right. It was right at the exact moment the condition was at its worst, and there is not a hint anywhere in the line that Heaven was waiting for the numbers to move. You have never once been on a waiting list, and that is written into the timing of the verse itself, and the Spirit of God has kept it standing there in the plain for two thousand years.

You have been come for in that condition, not in the improved one, and that is written down in a letter that has been in circulation for two thousand years. The Holy Spirit put that verse in front of you tonight and He did not put a clause on it that the last twenty centuries somehow missed.

The entry condition nobody ever set

Here is the thing your whole system is built on, and I want to name it before we go one step further, because a thing that is never named just keeps running.

You believe there is an entry condition. Not out loud. You would say the right thing in a Bible study without even thinking. But in the private accounting, the one that runs at two in the morning, there is a level of together that a person has to reach before it is reasonable for God to come and get them, and that line sits above your head, and it has sat there for years, and every plan made in that room at two in the morning has secretly been a plan to reach it before asking for anything.

You were carried before one single thing about you was mended, and Scripture says it in the plainest way it knows how, and the same Spirit who inspired that plainness is not embarrassed by the condition you are in tonight.

Now say the harder half out loud with me, because half a truth here does real damage. The mending is not optional. Nobody left that leg alone on the sand. The woman with the green box worked on it a long time and she was not gentle, and if she had walked away and left it open that would have been a second injury and not a mercy.

Rescue first. Repair after. Both of them all the way, and never one instead of the other, and never the second one moved in front of the first one as a price.

One plain paragraph, straight out, because this site gets read at the bottom of things. If what is open in you tonight is not a leg but the thought of ending your life, do not sit with that alone until morning. In the United States, call or text 988 and a real person answers, any hour. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line, and if the number is not in your head, say that to whoever picks up and let them find it. Then tell one living human being in your house or on your phone before you sleep. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make you a burden to anybody. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and letting a pair of them get under your arms is obedience and not defeat.

You have been shouting look at my leg at people who are already carrying you, and Romans 5:6 answers it without ever once looking down at the leg, and the Spirit of God is saying the same thing over you while you read: the carrying is not waiting on the closing.