The Cove He Takes Nobody To

He has shown people every bit of that coast. It is a thing he genuinely loves doing and he is good at it, and there are visitors who came for a weekend eleven years ago and still send a card at Christmas.

He takes them to the arch, which everybody wants, and to the shelf where the water goes green in the afternoon, and to the little beach at the north end that you cannot see from the road and that has never had more than four people on it in living memory.

He does not take anybody to the cove.

Manu is forty two. It is not a secret. It is on charts. Anybody with a boat could go there and once or twice a summer somebody does.

He has just never taken a soul, and when the route goes near it he goes on, easily, without a pause, and nobody has ever noticed, because there is a great deal of coast and no one is counting.

Something happened there. That is the whole of what I will say about it, and this article will never ask him, or you, for one more word.

He is a believing man. He prays out on the water and it is not decorative. He would tell you God has the whole of him.

Except one bay, a mile and a half south of the arch.

If there is a place you steer past, this is written for you. And I want to say the first thing before anything else: nothing here will ask you to describe it. Not to a person, not to a group, not to me. This is between you and God and it stays that way.

He is the hiding place

Here is the line.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble.

Now, that is a sentence about God and I want to be precise about the grammar, because the grammar is the whole thing.

He does not say God keeps a hiding place ready somewhere. He does not say God will show a man where to hide. He says Thou art. God Himself is the location.

And once that has landed, the question of opening a shut place changes shape completely.

Because the fear underneath a shut place is always about location. It is: if I open this, it goes from somewhere safe to somewhere exposed. A person shuts a thing because a shut place is the only shelter they could find, and letting anybody into it feels like moving the thing out into the open.

But if God is the hiding place, then opening a room to Him is not moving the thing out. It is moving it in. It goes from the shelter a man could build to the shelter that God is, and the direction of travel is the exact opposite of what it feels like.

You are being invited to move a thing further inside rather than out into the open. Psalm 32:7 makes God Himself the hiding place, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written location and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands out on the water.

I want to say a word about the shut place itself, because it deserves respect and rarely gets any.

A man who shut a cove eleven years ago did a sensible thing with the materials he had. He had no shelter available except distance, and he used distance, and it worked well enough to let him go on being useful to a great many people. That is not a failure. That is what a person does.

You built the only shelter that was available at the time, and there was nothing wrong with using it. It is written that God is the hiding place without one word against anybody who found another, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written shelter into a life, which is why it holds out on a boat with the route going on past.

Preserve is a keeping word

And then the second half, and the verb in it is worth a minute.

Thou shalt preserve me from trouble.

That word is a keeping word. It is the one used for watching over a thing, guarding it, keeping it the way a person keeps something valuable rather than the way a person keeps something contained.

That distinction matters here more than almost anywhere. There are two very different reasons to keep a thing behind a door. One is that it is dangerous and must be contained. The other is that it is precious and must be guarded.

A man with a cove has usually assumed the first. That is why the door is shut. He has been running a containment operation for eleven years on the understanding that what is in there is hazardous.

And the word in that psalm is the other one. It is the guarding word. Which suggests that when a thing is brought inside God's shelter, what happens to it is not disposal, and it is not neutralization. It is keeping.

You have something that would be guarded rather than contained, and the difference is not small. Scripture uses the word for watching over what is valued, and the same Spirit at work in that psalm is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the steering past has gotten heavier over the years, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret and toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. And you do not have to say one word about the cove to do that: a good one will never require it, and a man can be well helped for years without ever naming it. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. None of that is a failure of faith. God has always worked through people.

Not yet is a real answer

Now I want to say plainly something that a lot of teaching in this area will not say.

You may not be able to open it. Not this season and possibly not for years, and that is not you refusing God.

I want that sentence standing on its own, because the unspoken implication in most writing on the subject is that a shut door means an unwilling heart, and that implication has done a great deal of quiet damage to good people. A shut door very often means a person is not yet in a position where opening a thing would be bearable, and God has never in any account we have of Him forced one.

And there is no window on this. The invitation does not close at the end of the summer. Nobody misses their chance. A man can steer past that bay for another twenty years and the same shelter is standing at the end of it with no note about the delay.

You are not refusing anybody, and there is no expiry written on the invitation anywhere. Psalm 32:7 states a shelter that simply is rather than a summons that can be missed, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you that you take the boat in there this year, or that anything changes if you do. That is not mine to promise you.

You are clean right now with the route exactly as you run it, and the route has never once been a witness about you. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.