Marking Tides, Not Mercies

There are thirty-one of them on the shelf above the coats, thin ruled notebooks with the years written on the spines in marker pen, and he can put his hand on any one of them in the dark.

High water. Low water. What the wind did. Whether the shingle came up or went down at the north end, which is the sort of detail nobody else in the village has bothered with in living memory. He has kept it every day since he was twenty-nine, through work and out the other side of work, and when people rib him about it he goes a bit quiet, because it is the one thing he has been faithful to and he knows exactly what it is worth. Twice the harbor trust has come to him about the shingle and both times the notebooks settled it.

Then the November storm, the one that took the bench off the front and put a foot of stones through two garden gates. And when it has blown itself out and the light comes back he walks down at low water the way he always does, notebook in his coat pocket, and the whole top of the bank has been rearranged.

And there is a stone standing out of it.

Not a beach stone. A cut one, granite, about the size of a coal sack, squared off, with a rough cross chiselled into the face of it and under that some numbers worn down to almost nothing. It has been in that bank a long time.

Half the village comes down over the next two days. Somebody photographs it. Somebody brings a brush. The oldest man in the parish is walked down there by his daughter, and he stands looking at it for a while and says his grandmother used to say there was a stone up there for the night the boats came back.

Which night. He does not know. How many boats. He does not know. Whose. He does not know, and nor does anybody else, and there is nobody left to ask.

So something happened. Something happened on this beach that was worth cutting granite for, worth a family paying a mason, worth hauling up a shingle bank by hand. Somebody stood here and knew exactly what it was and how many came home and what it cost and what God had done, and they set the stone so it could never be lost.

And it is lost. The stone survived a hundred and something winters. The memory did not survive three generations, because nobody wrote the words down beside it.

He walks back up to the house and he is not right for the rest of the day, and in the evening he stands in the hall looking at thirty-one notebooks, every single one of them a complete record of what the water did, and he cannot find one line in any of them about what God did.

You have your own shelf. It might be a calendar, or a phone full of photographs, or a memory for names that people find uncanny. And somewhere in it there is a column you have kept perfectly and a column you have never started.

Joshua did two things that afternoon, not one

At the end of his life Joshua gathers the whole nation at Shechem, and after all of it is said and agreed, he does something practical.

And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, that was by the sanctuary of the LORD. And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us; for it hath heard all the words of the LORD which he spake unto us: it shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God.Joshua 24:26-27

Count the actions. He wrote the words. Then he set up the stone. Two things, on the same afternoon, and the second one is useless without the first, as a whole beach in November could have told him.

A stone with no words is a mystery. Words with no stone are a page in a drawer. Joshua put the two together and that is why we still know what happened at Shechem and do not know what happened on that shingle bank.

You have been given both halves already and neither of them has to be manufactured tonight, because Scripture is the written half and it has been standing for three thousand years, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps handing you back the days you thought had gone.

The stone was a witness because it was present

Now, one thing about Joshua's wording, because it matters and because I come from people who have had this misread for them more than once.

It hath heard all the words of the LORD. Joshua is not saying the granite has ears, and he is certainly not asking anyone to reverence it. He is saying what any of us would say about the kitchen table our grandparents settled things across: it was there. It stood in the field while the words were being said, and because it was there and cannot be argued with, it can be pointed at. The ground and the sea and the stone are God's handiwork and they are wonderful, and they are not anybody you talk to. The witness is a witness because it was present, not because it is alive.

And note the reason Joshua gives for wanting one. Lest ye deny your God. Not lest you get sentimental. He knew that a people who had walked through the Jordan on dry ground would, inside two generations, be capable of saying that nothing much had ever happened.

That is what an unmarked mercy does. It does not stay a quiet mercy. It becomes, eventually, an argument for God's absence.

Right now, as you read, you are being handed the pencil rather than the accusation, because Scripture put the witness there to protect the people and not to prosecute them, and the Holy Spirit is the one prompting the memory that is already surfacing in you as you read this sentence.

It does not have to be the night the boats came back

Here is where I want to be careful with you, because this category gets ruined by people who make it grand.

The stone on that beach is a big story. Yours does not have to be. There is nothing in Joshua's instruction about scale, and the memorials scattered through Scripture are a mixed bag: twelve river stones, a heap of rubble, a jar, a name given to a piece of ground. Samuel's stone was set up after an ordinary afternoon that went better than expected, and he called it the stone of help and said only, so far the Lord has helped us (1 Samuel 7:12). So far. That is all he claimed.

So the entry can be four words. The letter came. The pain eased on the Thursday. She rang. The van started. The interview was moved. It went better than I told anybody I thought it would.

A small dated thing is worth more to you in five years than a large undated feeling, and if you have only small things then you have exactly what the jar and the heap and the twelve river stones were for. Scripture never once measured a memorial and told somebody it was too slight, and the Spirit of God is not embarrassed by four words in pencil.