The Boat He Will Not Name

It is two coats off finished.

That is not a figure of speech. It is genuinely two coats of varnish and a set of fittings away from going in the water, and it has been two coats off finished for two years and three months.

He goes in the shed. He goes in most weeks. He tidies, he checks it over, he oils the tools that do not need oiling.

He does not put the varnish on.

Everybody who knows him has a theory and none of them have asked him directly, because he is not a man you ask directly, and the theories are all things like he is a perfectionist and he does not want it to be over.

Here is the actual reason and he has never said it.

If he finishes it, it needs a name on the transom.

And he knows what the name is. He has known since before he cut the first plank. It is the name of a thing he has been waiting for, and it has not arrived, and it has been not arriving for a long time now.

So the boat stays two coats off, in a shed, in perfect condition, and he goes in and looks at it and comes out again.

He would tell you he has simply been busy. That is what he tells everybody, and it is not even a lie, because he is busy, and a man who does not want to do a thing will always be able to find enough work to be honest about.

If you have stopped short of something good, come and sit on this barrel a minute. Nobody is going to ask you what the name is.

The Spirit turns up exactly where a person has run out of words

There is a passage that puts help precisely where you are, and it is worth reading for how unembarrassed it is.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought.Romans 8:26

Notice where that sits. Paul has just spent several verses on waiting: the creation groaning, us groaning within ourselves, hoping for what we do not see and waiting with patience for it.

And then, immediately, the Spirit helps our infirmities.

He does not put the help before the waiting, as a way of avoiding it. He does not put it after, as a reward for having waited well. He puts it in the middle, at the exact point where a waiting person has run out, and he calls the running out an infirmity rather than a failure.

You are being met at the point where you ran out, and the running out is named as weakness rather than as fault. Romans 8:26 places the Spirit's help immediately after the waiting rather than instead of it, which means the shed and the two coats are precisely where the help is described as arriving.

A stall is not a sin, and it is not a character

Now the thing that has never been said out loud, which is not perfectionism.

You stopped because finishing has a cost you cannot meet yet, and everybody has been generous enough to accept the busy answer, and the true one is not sayable on a slipway. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and it is written of the exact place where a person has no words, and the Spirit named there has been under that boat with you the whole time.

That is not weakness of character. It is a person protecting themselves from a small daily ceremony they have not got the strength for, and it is the most understandable thing in this article.

But it has a cost of its own, which you know, or you would not be reading. A good thing has been sitting in a shed for two years with everything done to it except the part that would make it a boat.

You have not gone smaller through this, whatever a shed full of unfinished work suggests. 2 Corinthians 4:16 says the inward man is renewed day by day while the outward perishes, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that renewing, which means the two years have not been an emptying even though they look like one from the door.

And I am not going to tell you the waiting ends, or when. Nobody writing to you from a distance knows that, and a promise about your life from somebody who does not have to live in it is worth nothing.

I am also not going to tell you to finish it. That is not the assignment. The boat can stay exactly where it is, and nothing in this article is a lever to get varnish on it.

You have somewhere to put the weight, and putting it there does not require you to finish anything. 1 Peter 5:7 says cast all your care upon Him, for He careth for you, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a real handing over rather than a form of words, which means the name you cannot write has an address and it is not a shed.

God is the one holding you, and He has been holding you through every week you went in and came out again.