Put the Stick Down

He has a stick. That is the first thing you would notice about him if you were on that beach at the end of the summer, because everybody else has a plate and he has a stick, and he has been holding it for two hours.

Twelve of them came down for the evening. The tide brought the wood in months ago and left it up under the dune in a long gray tangle, bleached and dry and free for the taking. Somebody's daughter lit it with one match and half a page of newspaper and made a great production of it, and everybody cheered, and then everybody sat down.

Except him. He gets up every four or five minutes. He rearranges. He pushes a branch further in with the stick. He fetches more wood he does not need. When his sister tells him to sit down and eat, he says, "It's fine, it's fine," which is what a man says when he has decided that something is his responsibility and would rather not discuss it.

At some point his knee goes and he sits, properly, with a plate, for the first time all evening.

Ten minutes later the fire is exactly as it was. Twenty minutes later it is better. A beach fire in September with that much driftwood stacked into it does not, as it turns out, require a man with a stick.

And here is the small thing he notices with a plate on his knees, which he had somehow never noticed standing up. He did not gather the wood. The sea did that, over a whole winter, without consulting anybody. He did not light it. He arrived after it was lit.

He appointed himself keeper of a fire that was already burning when he got there.

You know that job. You did not apply for it either. Somewhere in the years since God first got hold of your heart, you took on the maintenance of your own affection for Him, and you have been at it a long time now, and you are tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

That is why the promise of a warm week does not lift you the way it used to. You have had warm weeks. You know how they end. Even if something comes back on Sunday, you have already done the arithmetic, and you have got it gone again by about March.

The keeper nobody appointed

Let us be careful here, because there is a version of this teaching that would land on you like a criticism, and that is not what this is.

Nothing is wrong with you for having taken the job. It came out of love. A person only stands over a fire with a stick because they are frightened of what the evening looks like without it, and the same fear has been sitting in you about a life with no warmth left in it toward God. That is not sin. That is a person who cares.

But you were never made the keeper, and the exhaustion you feel is the honest exhaustion of a man doing a job that was already taken.

You are being tended right now, by the One who lit this in the first place, and the tending has not paused while you were busy. That is not a lovely thought I am offering you; it is what the prophet was given to write down in God's own voice about a vineyard He calls delightful, where He says plainly, I am its keeper (Isaiah 27:3), and it is His Spirit who keeps a person alive to God rather than the person's vigilance. Nobody in that passage is asked to grow better in order to qualify for the keeping.

I, the LORD, am its keeper; every moment I water it. Lest anyone harm it, I keep it night and day.Isaiah 27:3

Read the job description again

Sit inside that sentence for a minute, because there are three claims in it and every one of them has quietly been your own job until now.

I am its keeper. That is not a description of an attitude. It is a title, taken, in the first person, by God, over a growing thing that could not possibly keep itself. The vineyard is not consulted about the arrangement and the vineyard is not thanked for cooperating.

Every moment I water it. Not in season. Not when the vineyard looks promising. Every moment, which is a phrase that leaves no gap in itself for the dry stretch ahead, because from His side there is no dry stretch. What you experience as a dry March is not a pause in the watering.

I keep it night and day. Night is in there deliberately. The hours when nobody is looking, the hours when the vineyard is doing nothing at all, the hours you would describe as your worst.

You have a life that a tireless keeper is watering, and it is watered on the days you notice nothing whatever. The word puts the safety of that vineyard entirely in the keeper's hands and never once in the vine's performance, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw at the first cold morning. Everything you have ever kept has run down, including this, including you, and you concluded from that experience that keeping is simply a losing job. It is a losing job when the keeper is finite.