The Seawall After the Gathering

The folding tables go back in the shed in the same order every year, longest legs first, and he is the one who knows the order.

He has known it since his father stopped being able to lift a table. Four families, one pavilion at the far end of the county park, foil pans going cold under the lights, an ice chest with nothing in it now but water, somebody's kid asleep across two folding chairs. Every year, before anybody eats, the noise drops off and they all turn and look at him, and he prays.

Nineteen years he has prayed over that table, and he is good at it. He says every name, the ones standing under the lights and the two who are not standing anywhere anymore, and by the amen half the room is wiping its face.

Then it thins out. The trucks go one at a time across the gravel. His sister honks twice at the gate the way she has honked twice at every gate since she was seventeen. Somebody always leaves a cooler.

And he does not go home yet.

He walks past the pavilion to where the grass stops and the seawall starts, and sits down on it with his back to the lights and his boots over the water. The tide is going out. The concrete is still giving back the day's heat through his jeans. There is salt dried white along the top of the rail and he runs his thumb through it without thinking, the way he has since he was a boy on this wall.

And the thing stands up in him at this same hour every year.

What is it, actually. Born again. I have said those words my whole life. Did it happen to me? Would I know if it had? And who exactly am I supposed to ask?

Not one person who was under that pavilion tonight. That is the whole shape of it. He is the one they look at when the noise drops off. His nephew came up out of the water in June and asked him what it meant, and he answered him well, and then sat in his truck a while with the keys in his hand and the door open.

You know the seawall. Yours might be a kitchen at eleven at night with everybody upstairs, or a truck in the driveway with the engine off, or a stairwell at the church after the lights are down. And you know the question, standing up in you at the one hour when there is nobody left to be steady for, and the reason it has never once left your mouth. Not shame in front of God. The four families who would have to go find somebody else to look at.

A man who walked across a city at this same hour

Stay on the wall a while. I want to sit somebody down next to you, and I am not inventing him. Scripture put him there.

His name was Nicodemus. A Pharisee, John says, and a ruler of the Jews, which meant a seat on the council, which meant he was one of the men other men looked at when the noise dropped off. And he had a question he could not ask in front of anybody, so he did the one honest thing a man in his position could do with it. He came to Jesus by night (John 3:2).

I have heard him preached as a coward for that, and I will not have it. Of all the men on that council, one got up and walked across a city in the dark and knocked, and he opened with honor, calling Him a teacher come from God. I keep ground for a living, and this is what I know about a man who walks out into the dark to check on something: he walks out because he cares what happens to it.

You are in good company on that wall, and the company has a seat at the front of the room, same as you. That is not my flattery. Scripture kept the hour of that visit on the record on purpose, and it is the Spirit who takes a night two thousand years old and sets it down beside a seawall, so a man out here at low tide knows he is not the first to come at this hour.

And watch what was done with him. He was not sent away and told to come back in daylight. He was answered, and at that hour he was handed the sentence the whole world has since learned by heart, that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. That was not shouted to a crowd. It was said in the dark, to a respectable man, about a question he could not ask in the day.

The night was never a hiding place

Here is the part I want to say slowly, because it takes apart the whole arrangement.

The question has been kept from four families. Fair enough. It has never once been kept from God, and here is where that is written down.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.Psalm 139:11-12

Sit with what that says about the last nineteen years. The question felt like a thing carried in the dark, and it was carried in a room that was fully lit and had Him in it the whole time. There was no exposure coming down the road, because there was nothing left to expose.

You were read a long time before tonight, and nothing was taken off you when you were read. That is Psalm 139, and it is His Spirit who makes a psalm stop being a page and start being an accurate description of a seawall at ten at night. Nineteen years of praying over that table with the question sitting under your ribs, and He saw both at once, in the same man, and left the table where it was.

You have a place where the question is already known and has still never once been repeated. His word is full of men who brought Him the thing they could not say in front of their own people, and the Spirit who blows where He wishes has never been a Spirit who reports back to the council. It is His nature to answer, the way it is water's nature to find the low ground.

What He said to a man who wanted a method

Nicodemus asked the question a competent man asks. How can a man be born when he is old? And then, how can these things be? He wanted the mechanism. That is what a teacher does with a thing he does not understand: he takes it apart on the bench to see how it runs.

And he was answered with weather.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

I keep land, and I have never once been able to tell you where a wind starts. I can tell you it came through, because the tops of the trees moved and there is seed growing forty yards from anywhere I planted seed. You do not audit a wind. It does not come apart on the bench.

You were never required to understand it before it could be true in you, and that was not a clause somebody hid from you. It is written right there in the answer He gave a teacher of Israel, and the Spirit who blows where He wishes has never waited on a man's comprehension before moving through his life.

Hear the mercy inside the sharp thing Jesus said next, when He asked him, are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? (John 3:10). That is not a man being lowered. That is a man being told the truth about the category. This one was never on the exam, because it is done from above, to a person, by Someone else.

You are the same man on that wall tonight that you were under the lights an hour ago, and it is the word that keeps you there, not an answer you do not have. Nobody handed Nicodemus his seat back as a bill. The next time he appears he is standing up in that council insisting a man get a hearing before he is judged (John 7:50-51), and at the end he is carrying spices to a tomb in daylight (John 19:39). The Spirit was at work in a man who asked in the dark, and heaven was not embarrassed about it.