The Same Water Twice

She has been sitting in the supermarket car park for twenty minutes with the phone in her hand and the name on the screen.

The engine is off. The shopping is in the boot and there is nothing in it that will spoil. She has scrolled past the name four times so that pressing it would feel accidental, and it has not felt accidental once.

Two years ago that name drove eighty miles on a Tuesday night and sat on the end of her bed until it got light.

She got out. That is the part that has her stuck in a car park. She did not slink out quietly; she got out and it held, and eleven months later she stood up in front of about sixty people in a warm room and said so, and a woman she had never met cried in the second row, and afterwards four people wanted to talk to her by the door.

She meant every word of it. It was all true. It is still true.

And she is back in it.

I am not going to name what it is, because yours is not hers, and you already know what yours is. What matters is the arithmetic she has been doing in the car park, and it goes like this: the first rescue cost somebody eighty miles and a night. The first rescue was spent on her in front of witnesses. And she has gone and used it up, and there is nothing to show for it, and to press that name now is to walk back into a room she has already been carried out of once.

So she rehearses the sentence and cannot say it. Not because she doubts God can. Because she cannot bear to be the woman who needed it twice.

That is the whole of it. Not the falling. The asking.

And that is where you are, or you would not still be reading, because nobody reads this far by accident. Yours might be a name in a phone, or a doctor, or a person in your own house who is eight feet away and asleep, or the plain fact of your own voice in an empty room saying God, it is me again.

You are not stuck because you cannot get out. You are stuck because you cannot ask.

Where that line is actually standing

There is a line about mercy that gets embroidered and hung in kitchens, and almost nobody knows what it is standing in the middle of.

It sits in the third chapter of a book of laments, written by a man looking at a burnt city. Read the page before it. He walled me in so I cannot get out. He has made my chains heavy. Even when I cry out, He shuts out my prayer. He is like a bear waiting for me. My soul is bowed down inside me.

Then, without warning, in the middle of that page, the man turns.

The covenant love of the Lord has not come to an end. His mercies are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

Now look at what he actually says, because it is not what the embroidery says.

He does not say the mercies are large. He says they have not run out. That is a statement about a supply, made by a man who had every reason on earth to believe he had drained it.

He had not. You have not either. Lamentations 3:23 puts the mercies out fresh every morning and never once consults the morning before it, and the Spirit of God, who moved a man sitting in a burnt city to write that line down while the smoke was still going up, is the one holding the page open in front of you now.

And new every morning does not mean cheerful. It means the ones for today are today's, freshly put out, not carried over, not deducted from a balance. Whatever was spent on you two years ago was not taken from what is on the table this morning. There is no ledger. There has never been a ledger. That is the entire point of the word.

So you are not carrying a balance into this morning. Joel 2:25 has God restoring the years that got eaten, which is not the language of a supplier working out what is left, and the Spirit of God has never once added up what you cost Him and set it against what you are asking for now.

And then the last clause, and this is the one that gets you out of the car park.

Great is Your faithfulness. Not mine. His.

The thing that held the first time was never your grip. You did not get out by holding on well. Somebody came into the water after you, and if you could have got yourself out you would have, both times, and you know that better than anybody trying to explain it to you.

You were held. That is the whole of what happened, and Micah 7:8 is a line spoken by somebody sitting in the dark with the fall already behind them, and what it says is not I will manage better next time, it is when I fall, I shall arise. The same Spirit who put that sentence in a man's mouth in the dark is the one in the car park with you.

So the second rescue is not a smaller one. It is the same arm.