The Knot He Ties Again

The cleat hitch is one of about four knots a person actually needs and he has been tying it since he was seven years old.

It takes four seconds. Figure eight, figure eight, hitch, done. It holds a boat against weather that would take a car off a road, and it holds because of the friction of the turns and not because of how hard anybody pulled.

Nainoa ties it, steps back, looks at it, and unties it.

Then he ties it again.

He does this on maybe one evening in three. Not on the first line, which he does not touch. On the stern line, and always the stern line, and he could not tell you why the stern.

He is thirty six and he crews and he has tied ten thousand of these. If you asked him whether that knot was holding, he would say yes without looking, because it was.

There is a thing from years back. He took it to God, on the water, and he did it properly, and he has taken it back to God on the water many times since, and about a year ago, standing on a dock with a wet line in his hands, he noticed that the two things have the same shape.

He believes it was dealt with the first time. He would say so plainly.

If there is a knot you keep undoing, this is written for you. And I want to give you one line from a man who was still recovering when he said it, because where he says God put the thing is the point of the whole verse.

Behind thy back

Here is the line.

for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.

Hezekiah wrote that. He wrote it in a piece he composed after being told he would not recover and then recovering, and one of the things I love about the whole passage is that it is written in the middle of things rather than at a tidy distance from them.

Now, behind thy back.

That is a strange place to specify. God could have been said to have put it anywhere. Behind the back is chosen deliberately and it means one thing: it is the one location a person cannot see without turning.

And God does not turn.

So this is not a picture of distance. It is a picture of a decision about attention. The thing has been placed in the only spot where it will never again be in the field of view of the one who put it there, and it stays there because He does not go looking.

You have something placed where God has decided not to look, and the placing was a decision about His attention rather than about geography. Isaiah 38:17 puts it behind the back specifically, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written decision and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands on a dock.

Now I want to be careful, because a man who goes back to God about a thing on one evening in three could hear that as a rebuke and it is not one.

Nothing here forbids you to pray about it. God is not tired of you and has never once been short with you. Bring Him anything, as often as you want, for the rest of your life, on the water or anywhere else.

The verse does not touch the may. It touches the must.

You have been released from a requirement rather than told off for a habit, and the difference between those is the whole of this. It is written as a statement about where God put a thing, and His Spirit is the one carrying a lifted requirement into a life, which is why it holds on an evening when you untied it again.

He says it in the middle

There is something about when Hezekiah says it that matters as much as what he says.

He is not writing this from a comfortable distance years later. Read the whole piece and you find a man still shaken, still going over what happened, still saying frankly hard things about the experience. It is not a tidy composition. It has the roughness of something written while the thing is still close.

And in the middle of that, he states the fact about his sins in the completed tense. Thou hast cast.

He is not waiting until he feels settled to say what is true. He says it while unsettled, as a separate item, sitting right beside the unsettledness in the same poem.

That is permission for a man on a dock with a wet line. The knot in your hands and the fact about your standing can be in the same evening without either one being a comment on the other.

You are entitled to state a completed fact while still in the middle of something, and Hezekiah did exactly that in the same poem. Scripture puts the finished tense inside an unfinished piece, and the same Spirit at work through that passage is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where it cannot be skipped. If the untying has grown into something that governs your evenings, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call a doctor. Sit down with a counselor. 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. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.

A knot does not hold by pulling

There is one more thing and it belongs to the rope rather than to the verse, and I think it is the same lesson.

A cleat hitch does not hold because of force. It holds because of the geometry of the turns. A man can put everything he has into that line and it will not hold better than a correctly laid hitch tied with two fingers. The holding is in the arrangement and not in the effort.

Every sailor knows that in his hands. Almost nobody carries it into the rest of their life.

The arrangement holds. The pulling adds nothing. That is true of the stern line and it is true of the thing behind God's back, and the reason a man unties a good knot on one evening in three is that somewhere in him he suspects the holding depends on his attention to it.

It does not. It never did. It is in the arrangement.

You are held by an arrangement rather than by your attention to it, and the arrangement was made by somebody else. Isaiah 38:17 puts the casting in God's hands and reports it as done, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

I am not going to tell you that the stern line stops getting undone. It has been going on a long time and things that old go at their own pace, and if you do it tomorrow it would not mean anything failed. Nobody has the right to hand you a date.

You are clean right now with the line in your hands, and tonight's version changed nothing about it in either direction. It is written and it is cast behind, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.