The Touchline in the Wind

Ten o'clock on a pitch that is really the end of a park, with two portable goals that have to be carried out of a container and put back into it, and a wind coming straight down the length of it that will be a factor in the result and that everybody has already accepted.

Under elevens. He has had this lot since they were eight.

There are two dozen parents along the far side in coats, holding cups from a flask somebody always brings. There is a father who shouts too much and has been spoken to twice, kindly, and is getting better. There is a small girl on the near end of the pitch who is the best player in the league and who is entirely unbothered by that fact.

He walks the touchline. That is what a coach at that level does: forty yards up, forty yards back, calling three or four things, most of which is just his voice being there.

And every single Saturday, in the middle of it, he becomes aware of his own back.

That is the closest he can get to describing it. Not that anybody is looking. Not that anybody has said anything, ever, in four years. It is a feeling of being open at the rear, and it started a long way back, out of a thing another person did, and it is the reason he never coaches from the middle of the line where the parents are.

Sit on the bench by the container with me. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And I will say the honest thing first: I am not going to promise you the feeling stops on the way down the touchline. This message does not do that. What I will do is read you the two positions in a verse.

Two positions, and both of them are His

There is a sentence in Isaiah with a piece of military vocabulary in it that the old translators kept and that most modern ears go straight past.

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy rereward.Isaiah 58:8

Rereward. It is an old spelling of rearguard. It is the body of men who march at the back of a column, whose entire job is what is behind everybody else, and who exist because a column on the move is at its most vulnerable at the rear.

Now count the positions in that sentence.

Something goes before. Something covers behind. Front and rear, and neither of them is you.

Israel had seen this arranged once already, in the most famous night in their history, when the pillar that had gone in front of them moved and came round and stood between them and what was chasing them. Isaiah's readers would have heard that immediately.

You are covered at the rear by the glory of the Lord, and you were never the one who had to watch your own back. I am not offering you a warm image. The written word names a front and a rear and assigns both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto forty yards of touchline in a wind.

Break forth is a dawn word

Now the front of the verse, because there is a thing in it about effort that you need.

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning.

Break forth is what a dawn does. Nobody produces a morning. Nobody in the history of the world has ever assisted one. It arrives, it does it on its own schedule, and the most a person can do is be up and outside when it happens.

And the whole chapter around it is God taking a religious people who are working extremely hard at the wrong things and redirecting them into ordinary care of ordinary human beings. Feed somebody. Take somebody in. Do not hide yourself from your own flesh.

Which is what a man does on a touchline with two dozen children he has had since they were eight.

You are already in the life that chapter is describing, and you were never going to have to manufacture a morning. Scripture uses a dawn verb for the light and puts ordinary care in the paragraph before it, and it is His Spirit, not a better Saturday, who brings a morning up over a park.