Something Had Me Before I Knew

You are nineteen and standing on the end of a stone jetty in your work boots, and you are not even swimming. You are just standing there.

It is the first properly warm evening of the year. The tide is running out hard round the end of the wall, the way it does there, and a slab of green weed on the edge does exactly what green weed has always done, and you go in sideways, boots and all, with your jacket on.

Here is the whole of what you remember, and it is not much.

You remember the cold arriving as a sound and not as a feeling. You remember your jacket filling and going heavy across the back and pulling your shoulders down. You remember the wall of the jetty being enormously higher from underneath than it looked from on top, and thinking, quite calmly, that there is no ladder on this side.

And then a hand closed on your upper arm.

Not your wrist. Your arm, above the elbow, from behind, and it did not let go and it did not slip. Whoever it was got a fistful of jacket in the same grip and hauled, and the next thing in your memory is concrete against your cheek and somebody's knee in your back and the taste of the harbor in your mouth.

You never saw a face.

People said afterwards it was one of the men off the boats. Somebody said a name. You said thank you into a crowd, generally, at nobody, and then your friend drove you home with the heater on full and you sat there shaking in a towel. You have never once been able to picture him.

And here is the part you have never told anyone.

You did not know you were drowning. You had not got there yet. In your own head you were still working the problem in an orderly way: there is no ladder on this side, so I will go along the wall to the slipway, so I need to swim about forty feet, and my jacket is heavy but it will be fine. That was the sentence you were in the middle of.

Something had you before you finished it.

And that is the thing you have never worked out how to say. Not just at the jetty. There was a whole year of your life on dry land where the same thing happened, and you have never been able to name the hand, and so you have quietly filed the entire rescue under luck.

The order the two things happen in

There is a night on the water in Matthew's account and everybody remembers the wrong half of it.

Peter is out of the boat and the wind is up and he starts to go down. And then this, exactly this, in this order.

And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, O you of little faith, why did you doubt?Matthew 14:31

Read where the sentence puts the catching. Immediately. Before a single word is spoken. The hand goes out and closes and the man is held, and only then, from inside the grip, does anybody say anything about faith at all. You are standing inside that same order tonight, exactly as it is written in Matthew 14:31, and the Holy Spirit has never once run it backwards for anybody.

That order is the whole gospel in one verse and it is almost always quoted the other way round. The question was not the price of the rescue. The question was asked by a Man who already had hold of him and had no intention of letting go while He asked it.

You have been held first and asked afterwards, and that is not a nice way of putting it. It is written into the sequence of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the sequence got recorded in that order and not the other.

And notice something else about Peter, which nobody ever mentions. He never saw the hand coming. He was looking at the wind. Matthew is explicit that Peter saw the wind and was afraid, so his eyes were nowhere near the place the rescue actually came from, and he found out about the grip the way you find out about a grip, which is by being in it.

What the hand was doing before you noticed

Take the thing you filed under luck and set it back on the table for a minute.

The reason you filed it there is honest, and I want to say it plainly rather than talk you out of it. You had no face to attach it to. Nothing in you cried out. There was no moment where the danger announced itself, so there was no moment where you asked for anything, and a rescue with no request in front of it never felt like it belonged to you.

But look at what that reasoning quietly requires. It requires the reach to be triggered by your understanding of your own situation. It makes your grasp of the danger the switch that turns the arm on. You have never once been the one holding that switch, there is not a line in Scripture that hands it to a drowning man, and the Spirit of God is not standing off at a distance waiting for anybody to reach it.

You were taken hold of before you had assessed anything, and His word is where that stands rather than in how the memory feels tonight. The same Spirit who moved on the face of the deep before anybody was there to watch it does not need a witness in order to have been working.

One plain thing here, said straight. If the water is not a memory and something in you is measuring how far down this could go, then tonight is the night to say it to a living human being and not to a screen. In the United States, call or text 988 and somebody picks up. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line, and if you cannot name the number, tell whoever answers that and let them find it for you. Say it out loud to one person in your house or on your phone before you sleep. That is not a failure of faith and it does not turn you into anybody's burden. God has put real rescue into human hands deliberately, and taking a human hand is obedience and not defeat.

Now the harder half, and it is the half that heals. You have spent years unable to say who had you, and the not knowing has felt like the disqualifier. It is not. Matthew 14:31 has a hand arriving before the words, and the same Spirit who is reading this over you now is not asking you to identify the arm before He will admit that it was there.