Ninety Years of Coral

The water was so clear that morning it did not look like water at all.

He was out past the break with a mask on, floating, and underneath him the whole thing opened up: heads of coral the size of a car, some of it in shapes that took a while to understand, fish going about their business in and out of it the way people go in and out of a market.

He was over it for maybe four minutes.

Later, on the beach, somebody who knew about these things told him what he had been looking at. That some of those heads grow less than a finger's width in a year. That the big ones out past the break had been building since before his grandmother was born.

Ninety years. Possibly more. Underneath him, for four minutes, while he floated on top of it and thought, that is nice.

He drove home along the coast and it worked on him the whole way, and by the time he got to the turn he had put it together with the thing he did not want to put it together with.

Fourteen months ago something happened to him that he does not talk about. Not an accident, and not a bereavement, though it has some of the shape of one. A thing done to him by a person he trusted, and the way it went afterwards.

And he gave it four days.

Four days off work, and a resolve, and a plan, and then a very clear internal instruction that this was not going to be allowed to define him and it was time to be fine.

Fourteen months of being fine. And every so often something small goes past him in a corridor at work and he is on the floor again, privately, for about half an hour.

He has been treating that as a failure. He has been treating it, if he is honest, as evidence that he is weak, because a strong man would have been fine by now.

Ninety years for a reef, and four days for a man.

The renewal Scripture describes runs day by day

I want to name the wound before anything else, because it is real and it does not get skipped past.

Something was done to you by somebody you trusted. That is not a small thing and it is not a thing you brought on yourself, and nothing in this article is going to move on quickly from it in order to get to the encouraging part. It happened. You were right to be knocked over by it.

But hear this, and take it as already settled rather than as sympathy: you are being rebuilt, and the rate is not a report on your strength. That is not my soft reading of fourteen months, it is what stands written to the Corinthians, where Paul describes the inner person being renewed day by day in the middle of a passage about being hard pressed on every side, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that sentence has been renewing you on days you counted as wasted.

Look at the pace he names, because it is not the pace anybody would advertise.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Day by day. One unit at a time, in the smallest increment the language has. He does not say once, and he does not say quickly, and he is not describing a man who got over something.

So the timetable you handed yourself in the first week was not a strong man's timetable. It was a guess made by somebody in shock, and you have been holding your recovery to a schedule set by the least informed version of you there has ever been.

This is yours right now and not something to qualify for: what has been happening in you for fourteen months is construction, not failure. The word says the inward renewal runs day by day, and the Spirit of God is the one laying that down at His own rate, which is the rate at which anything that is meant to hold gets built.

Now the part that will take the shame out of the corridor.

A thing that goes past you at work and puts you on the floor for half an hour is not the wound reopening. It is the reef being touched. There is a structure there now that was not there fourteen months ago, and structures have edges, and an edge can be knocked.

You have read every one of those half hours as proof that nothing has been built. Read them the other way. Something is there to be knocked.

And the written word never once treats a slow recovery as a spiritual failing, which is why the Psalms are full of men saying how long, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you with the schedule you wrote in the first week.

Nobody here is giving you a new one either. There is no correct duration for this and there is not going to be a month at which you should be finished. That is the whole point, and if you take a number out of this you have taken the one thing that was not offered.