The New Boat Next Door

It came on a trailer on a Saturday and half the street came out for it, which is what happens.

New hull. Not a big one. But new, which out here is not a thing you see, and there is a smell that comes off a new boat that anybody who has kept an old one knows immediately and would rather not.

His has been going nine years on an engine he has rebuilt twice, and he could tell you every sound it makes and what each one means, and he is genuinely proud of that and it is not nothing.

He went over. He looked at it properly. He asked the right questions and said the right things and put his hand on the gunwale the way you do.

And walking back across the drive, in about the length of a driveway, he thought: I hope something goes wrong with it.

Not out loud. Not even fully. It went through him in about a second and a half and he heard it as it went.

That was in April.

He has not been able to put it down since. He has been round the houses on it. He has told himself it does not count because he did not mean it. He has told himself everybody thinks things. He has thought about the fact that he would be the first man on that drive with a tow rope if anything actually did go wrong, which is true and which does not help.

If you have caught a sentence going through you that you would never say, you know that driveway. And you know that the not being able to put it down is worse than the sentence was, and that there is nobody you could explain it to without it sounding either enormous or like nothing.

The word, and the commandment nobody can watch

Let me stand on the drive and say the plain thing, because you have been round the houses on this since April and it has not moved.

The problem is not the boat. You went over and looked at it and you were glad for him for most of the afternoon and that was real.

The problem is that you found out something about the inside of yourself in the length of a driveway, and there is nowhere to take it, because saying it out loud to anybody would make it either a confession or a joke and it is neither.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean a new hull. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. And it is not a quantity: nothing arrived on that trailer that came out of an allocation with your name on the rest of it, and your nine year engine is not a smaller portion of God's favor than a new hull.

Now here is the commandment, and I want you to notice where it is on the list.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.Exodus 20:17

It is the tenth. And it is the only one on the whole list that nobody can see you keeping.

Every other commandment on that list has a visible face. Murder, theft, adultery, false witness, the sabbath. A community can tell. This one happens entirely in the length of a driveway, and there is no witness, and that is not an accident of the list, it is the point of it.

God put a commandment on the tenth line that could only ever be between a man and Himself.

You are keeping something today that nobody has ever been able to see you keep, and that is the specific design of the tenth commandment. Exodus 20:17 governs the interior on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who searches a person, which is why a second and a half in April has been available to you at all rather than passing unnoticed.

Hearing it is not the same as being it

Now the second and a half, because you have been treating it as a discovery of your true self and it is not.

Here is the distinction and it is old and it is real. There is what arrives, and there is what is entertained.

What arrives is not chosen. Thoughts come. They come to everybody, they come to the best people you have ever met, and a great many of them are appalling, and the arrival of one is not a report on the character of the person it arrived in.

What is entertained is different. That is a thing given a chair. That is the man who takes the thought and turns it over and finds it pleasant and comes back to it in quiet moments because it is a comfort to him.

Apply that honestly. You did not entertain it. The evidence is that you heard it as it went, and you have been unable to put it down since April, and that you have thought about the tow rope. A man who is entertaining a thing does not spend five months troubled by it. He spends five months enjoying it quietly.

You heard it rather than housed it, and hearing was never the same as housing. Scripture puts coveting in the interior and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts, so the fact that a second and a half has bothered a man for five months is evidence about which direction he faces rather than about what he is.

And here is the thing about your engine, since you brought it up first.

Nine years. Rebuilt twice. You know every sound it makes and what each one means. That is not a consolation prize and I am not offering it as one. It is a real body of knowledge that a man with a new hull does not have and will not have for a decade.

You have something of your own that took nine years and that nothing arriving on a trailer could shorten. The written word puts the blessing on a person rather than distributing it as goods, and it is His Spirit who is the one bearing patience and faithfulness, which is exactly what nine years on one engine is made of.

What I will not tell you about the boat

Now, plainly, because a man on a drive can hear a soft sentence coming across the water.

I am not going to tell you that you will get a new one. I do not know. You may not, and that is allowed, and the boats a man does not get are not a spiritual matter.

And I am not going to tell you the old engine is better, which is the kind of thing people say and which you would see straight through, because you have rebuilt it twice and you know exactly what it is.

And I am not going to tell you the thought was nothing. It was not nothing. It was a thing at the door and you are right to have taken it seriously, and taking it seriously for five months is why it is still at the door and not in the house.

Both halves. His new hull is not evidence of God's favor and your nine year engine is not evidence of its absence.

You are favored and he has a new hull, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Scripture never once distributes God's face as a quantity, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold that on a driveway in April without needing one of them to be less true.