The Bow That Outlasts the Weather

The alarm is set for ten to four and he has not needed it in nine years.

What wakes him is the same small pressure behind the ribs every morning, and before his feet are on the floor his hand has found the phone on the crate beside the bed and his thumb has opened the chart. Swell height. Period. Wind, direction, gusting. The buoy out past the point reports every half hour all night whether anybody is reading it or not, and he reads it, and in the two seconds it takes the numbers to load he is holding his breath like a man opening a letter he has been dreading.

Four feet at ten seconds. Northwest, freshening.

And there goes the day. Not the fishing; he can fish in that, he has fished in a great deal worse. What has been decided is the weather inside him, and it has been decided this way for so long that he no longer sees the machinery working. Good numbers and he is a man in favor. Bad numbers and something has been quietly withdrawn from him overnight, and he goes down the stairs without putting the light on and does not say much to anybody until the ropes are off.

Ask him and he would deny every word of that. He is a practical man. He would tell you the sea is the sea.

Then comes a Tuesday in October. A squall gets up out of the west, quick and mean and over in twenty minutes, and he runs in early and ties up in the worst of it and stands under the eave of the ice house with his hood up and his hands in his pockets waiting for it to go through.

It goes through the way they do, all at once. The rain walks off east across the water and the sun comes in low and level under the trailing edge of the cloud and lights the whole wet town orange, the roofs, the puddles, the sides of the boats.

And there is a bow standing over the roofs. A full one. Both feet on the ground, one in the boatyard and the other somewhere out past the church.

He has seen a thousand of them. He has been at sea under them since he was fifteen years old. And the sentence that arrives in him, standing there in a wet jacket with his hands in his pockets, is one he did not assemble on purpose and would have been embarrassed to say out loud.

That is not weather. That was hung there.

That was hung there, and it was explained, out loud, in words, and the words were written down, and he has heard them read in a cold church at least twice in his life and could not tell you now what they said. Twenty years of getting up at ten to four to read the water for a message about where he stands with God. And the actual message has been standing over the ice house the whole time, and he has never once read it.

You do it too. Perhaps not with a buoy report. But there is a number, or a phone that rings or does not, or a face across a table, and you check it first thing, and by the time the kettle is on you have already been told where you stand.

Read it for the conditions

Here is what was said. Read it slowly, and read it the way you would read a contract somebody was asking you to sign, looking for the catch.

And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a token of a covenant between me and the earth.Genesis 9:11-13

Now find the condition. Take your time. There is no clause in it that begins with if, and there is nothing Noah is asked to keep up, maintain, renew or deserve. God says I will establish. God says I do set. Every verb that carries the weight of the thing has God as its subject.

And look at who is named as a party to it. Between me and you and every living creature that is with you. Noah, and his sons, and the cattle, and the birds off the roof of the boat. There are herons inside this covenant. A heron cannot hold up an end of anything, cannot promise, cannot remember, cannot repent, and God put it in the covenant anyway, which settles the argument about what kind of thing this is. It is not a deal. Nobody makes a deal with a heron.

Right now, as you read, that same word is standing over you unaltered, because Scripture calls it a covenant for perpetual generations and yours is one of the generations, and the Holy Spirit who moved on the man who wrote it down is the one carrying it across to you this morning.

Where He put the sign

Then read three verses further on, because this is the part almost nobody notices.

And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.Genesis 9:16

He does not say, look at it and remember. He says, I will look upon it. The sign was hung in God's own line of sight, and the remembering that gets named in the text is His.

Think about what that does to a man at ten to four in the morning. The whole question he has been asking the water, where do I stand today, has already been answered somewhere he was not looking, by Someone who was not asking him. The sign is not a memory aid for anxious people. It is God's own token, set where God says He looks.

You have been given something better than a good forecast. You have an oath with your name inside its perpetual generations, and Scripture puts the remembering on God's side of it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land in a body that has been braced since four o'clock.

Set in the cloud, and not instead of it

Notice where the bow appears. Not on a clear day. It takes rain and sun in the sky at the same moment, and it stands in the cloud, which is to say it stands in the weather rather than in place of it.

I am not going to tell you what your weather is for. I do not know, and a man who tells you is guessing at God's business. What I can tell you is where the sign was hung, and it was not hung on a fine morning. It was hung where the rain was.

So the promise was never that the swell would lie down. It was that the water does not get the last word about you, and that the covenant is not being renegotiated every night while you sleep by a buoy two miles off the point. The written word says the token stands between God and the earth, and the Holy Spirit is the one turning that from information into ground under your boots.