The Boat He Stopped Watching For

There is a window at the front of that house that looks straight down the water, and for about eleven years he stood at it every evening.

Not for long. Ten minutes, most nights, with a cup. He would say he was just looking at the weather and everybody in that house knew perfectly well what he was doing.

He was watching for a boat.

The details do not matter as much as you would think, and he would not thank me for setting them out. There was somebody, and there was a going away that was supposed to be temporary, and there was a stretch of years where every evening carried the possibility that this was the evening.

He does not stand at that window any more.

That is the whole of the change and nobody in the house has ever remarked on it, because it happened by degrees and there was no evening that was the last one. He simply stopped, and now he sits with his back to it, and if you asked him he would tell you the light is better on that side.

Here is what he worked out about himself last spring, sitting with his back to that window.

He did not stop hoping because he decided the boat was not coming.

He stopped because the expecting itself had become the expensive part. Eleven years of standing up every evening and putting himself in the way of it, and the disappointment was survivable and the hoping was not, and somewhere in there a man makes an arrangement with himself and does not tell anybody about it, including himself.

If you have quietly stopped expecting things, come and sit on the grass a minute. Nobody is going to hand you a date.

The blessed hope is a Person, and Paul does not attach a clock to it

There is a phrase in Titus that the whole of this tradition has carried, and the thing worth noticing about it is what it does not contain.

Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.Titus 2:13

Look for the timing in that sentence. There is not any. No season, no sign, no arithmetic, nothing a person could put in a diary. Paul is writing to people who were entirely capable of asking him when, and he does not tell them, and he does not apologize for not telling them either.

Which means the looking he is describing is a different shape from the looking you were doing at that window. Titus 2:13 puts the looking in the present tense with no arrival time fastened to it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person facing the right way through a long night, so what was at that window was a watch and never a countdown.

Your looking had a shape that could fail. Every evening was a small examination that could be passed or failed by a boat, and eleven years of that is not hope, it is a nightly verdict, and no human being can carry a nightly verdict indefinitely.

You are not a person who lost their faith at that window, and what wore out was not your hope. Titus 2:13 attaches the looking to a Person and to no date at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a hope alive in somebody without requiring them to stand up at seven every evening, which means what collapsed was a schedule you were carrying and never the thing itself.

Wanting it without dating it

Now here is the part I want to put carefully, because I am not going to hand you back the exact arrangement that broke you.

Nobody is asking you to go and stand at that window again.

The hope in Titus is not an evening vigil. It is more like the way you hold a thing you know is true about somebody you love: it does not require checking, it does not have to be renewed nightly, and it survives a Tuesday in which nothing whatsoever happens.

I am not going to give you a date, or a season, or a sign to watch. This site does not do that and I would not do it to you. The whole of what this tradition learned, it learned expensively, and the lesson was not that the hope was wrong. The lesson was that the calendar was never ours.

You are allowed to want it again, and wanting it does not put you back in the chair by that window. Romans 8:25 says that if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience, and the word there is the enduring kind rather than the watching kind, and it is His Spirit who supplies that particular endurance, so the thing being asked of you is not another eleven years of evenings.

And I want to say the plain thing about the cost, because you have never said it out loud.

It cost you a great deal. That is true and nobody is going to argue you out of it or tell you that it was good for you or that God arranged it to teach you something. You have been carried through eleven years of evenings, and you did not do that on your own strength. Isaiah 46:4 says I have made and I will bear, and it is His Spirit who does the bearing, which means the man sitting with his back to the window has been held the whole time he thought he was simply coping.