His cousin put a hand on his shoulder at the top of the beach in July and said one sentence, and he was up and away in about four seconds.
There was a reason. There is always a reason and it is always real: the cooler needed moving out of the sun, and he moved it, and it did need moving.
He has been doing that his whole adult life.
Somebody starts being kind to him and something in his legs arrives before anything in his chest does. A plate to take through. A chair to fetch. A thing on the fire that needs turning. Once, at a hospital, a car park ticket that did not need checking for another forty minutes.
He is forty eight and he has never once been sat still while somebody was kind to him.
The strange part, and the reason he has finally started thinking about this, is that he is not avoiding people. He is the warmest man in that family. He puts his arm round everybody. He is the one who says the true thing at the right moment and he has made three grown men cry in the last two years, all of them glad about it afterward.
He can give it standing up. He cannot take it sitting down.
And in July, when his cousin said the sentence and he got up for the cooler, he heard himself get up. He was walking back down the beach with a cooler in his hands and he thought: I do this. I have always done this. And I could not tell you why.
His wife, who has watched it for twenty two years, has never said a word about it.
You know the legs. Yours may find different jobs. But you know what it is to leave a moment on your feet with a real reason in your hands, and to have done it so often that nobody has ever finished a kind sentence in your direction.
Nothing in the verse asks you to hold still well
Let me name the pit before we go to the book, because if this becomes an instruction to sit down and feel something it will fail on the first attempt and you will not try again.
You are not graded on how well you sit, and you were comforted before you ever managed a still minute. Isaiah 66:13 puts every verb on His side and none on yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting.
The pit is not restlessness. You are not a restless man; you can wait four hours on a boat without moving. The pit is that kindness aimed at you does something in your body that you have never examined, and your body solves it, and the solving is so fast and so plausible that nobody has ever caught it, including you, for forty eight years.
So here is a sentence with no requirement in it about how well you sit.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
Read what is not asked.
There is nothing in it about the comforted one being still, or being ready, or being good at it, or feeling anything at the time. There is no condition anywhere. There is one who comforts, doing the whole of the work, and one who is comforted, doing none of it.
And look at who chose the picture. God did, about Himself, in the first person, in His own words.
Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground it never travels separately. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 66:13 is a simile God chose to say what His comfort is like, and it does not make God a mother, and He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him. Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.
You are not being graded on how well you sit, and you were comforted before you ever managed a still minute. Isaiah 66:13 puts every verb on His side and none on yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, which no amount of moving gets done.
Take that on the beach with a cooler in your hands, and know it is not my kindness, it is His own sentence. You are being comforted by God, and it does not depend on you holding still well. Isaiah 66:13 puts no condition on the one being comforted, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He is not put off by a man who gets up.
You keep saving yourself, and the water holds you fine.
You are not being asked to earn the right to sit down, and you were comforted before you ever stood up for anything. Isaiah 66:13 puts every verb on His side and none on yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, which is the one thing a man cannot get done by moving.
That is the shape of it, and I want to be careful here, because I am not going to tell you that the getting up is a moral failing. It is not. It is not disobedience and it is not pride and it is certainly not a lack of love, because you are the most loving man in that family and everybody knows it.
It is a correction that fires when the work stops. That is all it is.
And you cannot argue a correction out of a body. What you can do is give it a place where there is nothing to correct into.
So sit down where there is no plate, no chair, no cooler and no fire. Outside is best for you; you are not an indoors man and this will go better on a step or a wall or a bit of sand than it will in a front room.
Read the verse with your own name in it, and then keep your feet on the ground for one minute.
You are held while you do nothing, and the doing nothing is not what makes it work. That is Isaiah 66:13 with no requirement in it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He has been at it for forty eight years in a man who has always been on his way to move something.
Your legs will produce a job in the first twenty seconds. It will be a real job and it will need doing. Let it need doing for the rest of the minute.
And your cousin in July. He said one sentence and did not get to finish it, and he has not held that against you, and there is no repair owed there tonight. He will say it again; men like that always do.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting, feet flat. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a correction your body has run for forty eight years is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to stop it, which you cannot by deciding. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by how well you sit. When the correction quiets, and how, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Reason to stand up that arrives with every kind word, you are not obedience and you are not humility, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 66:13 says God comforts as a mother comforts, and there is no condition in that verse about holding still.
- Correction that fires the second the work stops, you have taken forty eight years of kind sentences off me and you do not get this minute. It is written that He chose the comparison Himself and that He is neither male nor female, and His Spirit does the comforting, which never once depended on my feet.
- Lord, You comfort me the way a mother comforts, and I do not have to be good at this. I sit down outside with my feet flat and read it out loud with my own name in it, and I let the job wait for one minute.
Isaiah 66:13
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