The Same Path Down to the River

He goes down to the river at ten past six, because he has gone down to the river at ten past six since he was nine years old.

The gate at the top of the field still does not fit over its post. You lift it, swing it, drop it, and it catches. His father's hands made exactly that motion, and now his do, and the gate has never once been fixed because nobody in that family has ever wanted it fixed.

Down the field. Wet to the ankle in the first thirty feet, always has been, because there is a spring under that corner that no dry summer has ever bothered.

The stile: two steps up, one long step down, and the third board is the one that gives a little.

Then the alder root. It comes up out of the bank and crosses the path at shin height, and it has been there since before he can remember, and every person raised in that valley steps over it without looking, and every visitor trips on it.

He steps over it without looking.

The path bends left. The sound of the water arrives before the water does, which is the thing he would tell you about that path if you ever asked him: you hear it a full twenty seconds before you see it.

And then the river, brown and fast with last week's rain, going the way it goes.

Three weeks ago everything at the top of that hill changed. I am not going to say which thing, because yours is not his, and I am not going to make you translate.

He came down here this morning because he could not stay up there.

And the path was exactly where it was.

Not similar. Not comfortingly reminiscent. Exactly where it was. The wet corner, the third board, the root, the twenty seconds of water sound before the water. All of it, unbothered, at ten past six, the same as it was when he was nine and had nothing at all to carry down it.

He stood at the bottom with his hands in his coat pockets and cried, which he had not done in the house, and he could not have told anyone why the path was the thing that did it.

That is you.

Maybe not a river. Maybe a road you drive without thinking about the turns. Maybe the sound your back door makes. Maybe a hymn that showed up this morning without being invited.

Something at the top of your hill has come down in the last few weeks. And something else has turned out to be exactly where you left it, and you do not know what to do with the second thing, and it took your eyes before the big thing did.

Let me say two things first, because they need saying first. What has happened to you is not a failure of faith. And I am not going to explain it to you. I do not know why it happened. Anyone who tells you they do is guessing in a confident voice.

Nobody in the text is asked to be philosophical about it

Isaiah 40 opens with an order to comfort people, and the very next thing that happens is that the man told to speak asks what on earth he is supposed to say.

That is in the passage. A voice says cry, and he answers: what shall I cry? All flesh is grass. The good of it is like the flower of the field. Grass withers. Flowers fade.

He is not being faithless. He is a man who has watched things wither, told to open his mouth about it, and his first honest sentence is a description of loss with no comfort attached to it yet.

Then the sentence turns.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.Isaiah 40:8

Read what that verse does and does not do. It does not say the grass was better off withered. It does not explain the wind. It does not tell the man in the field that his flowers came down for a reason he will appreciate later. It says the grass went and the word did not, and it sets the two side by side without making one the excuse for the other.

You have something under this morning that three weeks did not touch, and it was not your grip on it that kept it there. Isaiah 40:8 makes the word of God the thing that stands, not the man standing on it, and it is the Holy Spirit who presses that word down into a person until it carries weight. The path did not stay put because he remembered it well.

And notice where the standing is located. Not in the grass. Not in the flower. Not in the man's opinion of the wind.

You were never the one keeping that promise upright, and its standing does not rise and fall with how you slept last night. Isaiah puts the durability in the word of our God and nowhere else, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ancient sentence land in a particular chest on a particular Tuesday.

The things that were on the hill, and the things that were not

Here is a distinction small enough to carry down a field.

Some things were resting on the hill. Some things were not. In the last three weeks those two have collapsed into one category in your mind, which is not a fault in you. It is simply what a shaking does to a person's sense of what was load-bearing.

I am not going to ask you to count what is left. That is a cruel exercise, and it is almost always suggested by people who mean well and who are not standing where you stand. This is not an inventory. Nobody is auditing you.

You are held this morning without owing anybody an account of what survived. Isaiah 40 hands out comfort before it hands out anything else (Isaiah 40:1), and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter for exactly that reason, never the auditor.

And I am not going to tell you the hill came down in order to show you the path. It did not. That is a sentence people reach for because silence is uncomfortable, and it turns your loss into a teaching aid, and I will not do that to you.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you, and you do not owe anybody gratitude about that this morning. What is written in Isaiah 40 puts the enduring thing outside the man entirely, where the weather cannot reach it, and the Spirit of God is the one keeping that true in you on a morning when you cannot feel anything at all.

You were carried through every one of these twenty-one days, including the ones you cannot account for, and the carrying was never yours to do. That is not sentiment. Scripture keeps the everlasting God as the one who does not faint and is not weary, and His Spirit is given to us precisely because we do, and often, and this month especially.