The Float Is Doing Nothing

There is a stretch of that canal where the towpath is on the sunny side, and if you get on it before six you can watch the mist come off the water and go, which takes about forty minutes and which no photograph has ever got right.

Peg eleven. Same one he has fished for years, because the far bank shelves there and there is a bit of overhanging bramble that has never been cut back.

Two hours in. A flask. A slice of something he made himself and is quietly proud of. A heron on the far side that has been standing in the same place so long it has stopped registering as a bird.

And the float has not moved.

Not a dip, not a lift. It stands there with its tip out of the water in the way that a float does when absolutely nothing whatsoever is happening under it, and he has watched it for two hours and is perfectly content, because any angler will tell you that catching is a bonus and being there is the point.

He used to pray out here.

Whole mornings of it, in the way a man does when his hands are busy and the water is quiet. Nothing formal. It stopped about two years ago, and it stopped for a reason he has never said out loud, which is that he came to the view that a man ought to be in better condition before he starts.

Not repentant. He has been that, and meant it, and God took it. Better condition. Steadier. More settled. Less of whatever it is he thinks he currently is.

Sit down on the box next to me, friend. Today I am talking to the one who did something a long way back, took it to God straight and meant every word, and is now waiting until he is fit to come back.

And before you brace: nothing in this message makes naming anything a condition, and not naming it is not avoidance either, and I am not going to let it be called one.

Which of the two of you closes the distance

There is a line in James that has been used to put a weight on people, and read straight it does the opposite.

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.James 4:8

Now, plainly. Two movements in that sentence, and they are not the same size.

Yours is the first clause, and it is one step. Draw near. That is all it says. It does not specify a distance, it does not specify a condition, and it does not say draw near once you have got yourself sorted.

And the second clause is God's, and He is the one who closes the gap.

Think about the arithmetic of that. If a man is a very long way off and takes one step, the step does not cover the distance. It never could. What the verse promises is that the distance gets covered from the other end, and that the one step is enough to start it.

You are met by God when you move an inch toward Him, and you were never asked to cross the whole of it. I am not offering you an easy reading. The written word gives you one clause and gives Him the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto a towpath at six in the morning.

Better condition was never the arrangement

Now I want to deal with the thing you have never said out loud, and I want to do it without any blame in it, because there is none due.

You are not waiting because you think God is angry. You would say plainly that He is not. You are waiting because you think you ought to arrive as a better version of yourself, and that showing up in the state you are actually in is somehow disrespectful.

That is not humility. I know it feels like it, and I am not going to call it pride either, because it is neither. It is a rule about condition, and nobody in Scripture ever got that rule from God.

Every single person He drew near to in the Gospels was in the state they were in when He got there. Not one of them was asked to improve first and come back. Not one.

You are met in the condition you are actually in, and you were never expected to arrive as a better version of yourself. Scripture never records a single instance of God requiring an improvement before an approach, and it is His Spirit, not a steadier week, who brings a man back to praying at a canal.