Watered Every Moment

She waters on Saturdays. That is the honest version. She means to water in the evenings the way the back of the seed packet says, and then Tuesday happens, and Wednesday happens, and by Saturday morning the tomatoes have that gray look along the edges of the leaves and she stands over them with the hose feeling like a woman apologizing to a dog.

Somewhere along the way she started assuming God works the same shift she does. There is a good Sunday. There is a stretch of four or five days where the reading actually goes in and prayer is not a chore. That is the Saturday soaking. And then there is everything else, the flat middle of the week, and she does not hold it against Him, because He is running a very large operation and she is one of a very great many, and He gets to her when He gets to her.

Then, at the far end of the yard, on the shady side by the fence, where nobody has watered anything in four years, there is a wild green thing growing that has no business being that green in August. She goes over and pushes her fingers into the dirt and it is cool and damp six inches down. Underneath, the old pipe has a seam gone soft, and it has been letting out a little water. Continuously. Night and day. In the dark, unearned, unnoticed, without any ceremony at all.

You have built a theology out of Saturdays. You have taken the flat weeks as evidence that His attention was elsewhere, and you have been gracious about it, which is the sad part, because you never once complained about a neglect that was not happening. And underneath that whole dry-looking stretch of ground there has been a seam open the entire time.

Who is holding the hose

Isaiah 27 is a song about a vineyard, and it is deliberately the answer to an earlier song about a vineyard. In Isaiah 5 the vineyard disappoints and is left to the weather. Here God sings about a vineyard again, and this time He tells you what He does about it.

I the LORD do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day.Isaiah 27:3

Count the keeping. I do keep it. I will water it. I will keep it night and day. And notice that He says every moment, and then, as if He suspected somebody would read every moment as a figure of speech, He says night and day. That is a God going back over His own sentence to close a loophole nobody had found yet.

You are watered every moment, and never in bursts when somebody gets around to it. Isaiah 27:3 says every moment and then says night and day in case every moment was not plain enough, and His Spirit has held that seam open underneath the yard the whole time.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from believing you are being attended to intermittently. It is not despair. It is worse in a way, because it is polite. It makes a person grateful for the good weeks and quietly braced for the others, and it slowly teaches her not to expect anything on a Wednesday. But intermittent is a description of your experience of it, not a description of the supply.

You have been attended to on the days you have no memory of, and the dry weeks were not an absence. It is written that He keeps it night and day, and the same Spirit was working under the ground all the way through the stretch when the surface looked like nothing.

What your strength this year does not decide

Now to the thing underneath the thing. The fear is not really about watering. The fear is that even if people came, you would lose them the way you have lost the others, because that is your record, and a record feels like a character reference after a while.

I am not going to tell you who is coming. I do not know that, and nobody honest does. What I can tell you is who is doing the keeping, and it has never been you.

You were set among His people by a hand that does not get tired, and holding it together was never once on your list. Psalm 121:4 says the keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the same Spirit keeps you awake to a fact you were never asked to maintain.

Read the grammar of it in Peter. He does not say you keep yourself for God. He says kept by the power of God, which puts you in the passive voice on purpose, because the passive voice is exactly where the good news lives in this particular sentence. The vineyard is not responsible for the watering. It has never been asked to explain the dry patch. It only has to be the vineyard.

You are kept already, and your strength this year is not one of the terms. 1 Peter 1:5 says kept by the power of God, in writing, and the Spirit does the keeping through every hour you sleep straight through.