The Stone Fountain on the Promenade

For two years Eileen's day had a spine, and the spine was made of hours.

Half past seven. Eleven. Two. Six. The hours were never hers and she would not pretend otherwise, but they held the shape of a day the way ribs hold the shape of a chest, and at any moment of any afternoon she could have told you exactly where she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to be doing there.

Since February nobody has needed her at any particular time.

She is not in trouble. That is the thing she has to explain every time somebody asks, and she has stopped bothering. The bills are paid. The freezer is full. Her son rings on Sundays and her neighbor comes in on Fridays and there is nothing wrong with any of it.

But most afternoons at some point she puts her coat on and walks the front. Past the boating lake, out to the end of the sea wall, turn round, back. Forty minutes. If you stopped her halfway and asked where she was going she would not be able to answer, because she is not going anywhere and she is not coming from anywhere either. She is a woman moving through a town in which she is not due.

Halfway along, set into the wall on the landward side, there is an old granite drinking fountain with a worn basin and a little iron cup bracket with no cup on it. Nobody drinks from it any more. It has been running since the day it was put in.

Nobody thanks it. Nobody notices it. The water has never once stopped.

Eileen has walked past that fountain perhaps four hundred times since February and has never thought about it at all.

Placed is not the same as busy

Two different things got welded together in those two years, and they came apart in February, and nobody was there to tell you which was which.

The first is being needed at an hour. The second is being placed somewhere. For two years they arrived together every single day, so it was reasonable to assume they were one thing. They are not one thing, and the difference is the whole of this message: the hours named your location, and when the hours stopped the silence got read as evidence of being nowhere at all.

Look at what Isaiah 58:11 actually puts on the table.

The Lord will guide you always and satisfy your need in parched places and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.Isaiah 58:11

Read the verbs and count how many of them belong to you. Guide. Satisfy. Strengthen. Every one of them is God's, in continuous action, with no clock attached. The garden in that line is not commended for anything it did. It is a watered garden, and the only reason it is described that way is that somebody is watering it. You are planted, and you have not been asked to demonstrate it, and the Holy Spirit is pressing that into a woman who has been walking the front to prove she still goes somewhere.

Now, who exactly says you are anywhere at present? Not the diary; there is nothing in it. Not the phone; it is quiet on a Tuesday. Isaiah 58:11 says it, and His Spirit is the one carrying an old sentence to a bench at the end of a sea wall, and neither of them has consulted your calendar about it.

You have been told, kindly and by people who love you, to find something to join. A group. A course. Something to get involved in on a regular basis, ideally at a set time, and you have noticed how quickly the advice reaches for an hour. The written word does not go anywhere near that. Isaiah promises guidance in the parched place rather than a route out of it, and His Spirit is not going to hand you a timetable this afternoon, because a timetable is not what was actually taken from you.

I want to be honest about what this message is not going to do. It is not going to give you a next step. There is no plan in it, no suggestion, nothing to sign up for, and if you finish it with an empty Thursday you will not have missed the point. Isaiah 58 hangs the whole thing on what God does, and the Spirit of God has never once required a decision from a person before He would call them planted.

Which brings us back to the fountain in the wall.

That water is not running because somebody needs it at four o'clock. It is not running because the town looks at it, or thanks it, or has any idea it is there. It runs because it is connected to something that does not stop, and being unregarded on a Wednesday afternoon has never interrupted it for a second. That is not sentiment about plumbing. It is precisely the image Isaiah reaches for, a spring of water whose waters do not fail, and the Holy Spirit put it in your route on purpose four hundred times.