His grandfather started it in 1971 and worked at it until the year he died, and it was not finished, and everybody knew it would not be.
Nobody in that family talks about it as a project. It is simply a thing that gets done, in bits, by whoever is able, in the season when it can be done, and there is a box of notebooks going back fifty-one years that nobody has ever read all the way through.
Manu took it on properly when he was thirty-four. He is forty-six now.
He has done twelve years of it and he has been good at it, better than his uncle was, and he has brought two younger ones in who will still be at it when he is old.
And in February he was sitting on the slipway on his own with a flask, having done a full day, and a plain arithmetic thought arrived, and it was this: I will not see the end of this either.
He worked it out. Even at the best rate they have ever managed, even if the two young ones stay, even with everything going right, this finishes some time after he is dead.
And that landed on him differently than he expected.
He had always known it in a general way. Everybody knows it. It is the kind of thing that gets said at funerals in that family with a certain amount of pride.
But sitting on the slipway with a cold flask on a February afternoon, knowing it specifically, for himself, in numbers, was not the same as knowing it generally, and he sat there for a long time and then he went home and did not go back for three weeks.
Nobody said anything about the three weeks. There is no rota. That is part of how it survives.
But Manu knew, and what he was doing in those three weeks was not resting. He was standing at a distance from a thing he loves, working out whether a man is a fool to give his whole working life to something that will be finished by somebody who does not know his name.
And you may have your own slipway. Something handed to you that will outlast you, and a week where the arithmetic of it sat down beside you and would not move.
There is a whole chapter of them, and they all died still going
Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have carried it since February and it was never yours.
You are not a fool for spending a life on something you will not see finished. You never were. Scripture keeps a long list of people in exactly your position and does not treat one of them as having wasted anything, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the prospect of a finish, who holds a person to a work across a life. Set that down here on the stones. It is heavy and it kept you off this slipway for three weeks.
Now hear the line, and hear who it is about.
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.Hebrews 11:13
Still living by faith when they died.
That is written about the best of them. Not the ones who failed. The list it belongs to is the honor roll, and every single person on it is being commended for something they did not live to see completed.
And look at the phrase that describes what they did get: they saw them and welcomed them from a distance. That is a real experience and it is named as sufficient. Not a consolation. A thing they genuinely had.
You have that. Right now, on this slipway, with twelve years behind you. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who holds people across whole lives and across generations, and He has never once measured a work by whether the man who did it saw the end of it.
Now here is the part I want to put carefully, because your February arithmetic was not wrong. It was just incomplete.
There were people who worked forty years on one wrong, and several of the ones who began it were dead before it was done. One of the men who did the most died within days of the thing finally passing, and a good number of the ones who had carried it for decades were not there at all.
Nobody who reads about them now thinks those people wasted their lives. Everybody understands, without needing it explained, that the ones who were there at the end were standing on work that older hands had done and left.
Scripture puts the whole honor roll in the category of people who saw it from a distance, and His Spirit is the one who joins one generation's work to the next, and neither of those requires you to be present at the finish.
And I will say the honest half, straight, the way you would want it. Three weeks off did not answer the question and you know it did not. The question is not answerable by staying away, because a man standing at a distance from a thing he loves is not thinking more clearly about it. He is just further away.
So here is the turn, and it is small, and it does not require you to make peace with the arithmetic.
Go down to the slipway and do one afternoon's work.
That is the whole of it. Not a decision about the rest of your life. Not a settled view on whether it is worth it. One small piece of it, this week, sized so that a man of forty-six with a cold flask could do the same again next month.
Name the long thing out loud first, plainly, so it stops being a weight sitting on your chest and becomes a subject you can look at.
You have what that requires. Not one day when the sums look better. Now, knowing exactly what you know since February. His word says they were still living by faith when they died and saw it from a distance and welcomed it, and His Spirit is the one who joins your twelve years to whatever comes after, and neither of them ever asked you to be there at the end.
I am not going to tell you it will be finished, or when, or by whom. That belongs to God and He works in His own way and in His own timing, and I will not put a promise in His mouth to make this page land well. What I can tell you is what is already yours, and what is already yours is a place on a list of people who saw it from a distance and were commended for it.
Do the afternoon. Let the finish belong to somebody else.
Declare this over yourself
Say these standing on the stones, out loud, with the water in front of you. Nothing here is a task and nothing here has to be earned; it is already yours in Christ, and it was yours in the three weeks you stayed away. Scripture is what these lines stand on, His Spirit is the one who makes them live, and the outcome is His, answered in His own way and in His own timing.
- Arithmetic that sat down beside me in February, you are correct and you are not the whole account. In the name of Jesus I put you down on these stones, because a man who plants trees for somebody he never meets is not a fool, and I can stay with this after the feeling goes.
- Question of whether a life given to an unfinished thing is wasted, you cannot be answered from three weeks away, and you are not keeping me off this slipway. Scripture says they were still living by faith when they died and welcomed it from a distance, and welcoming from a distance is named as something they had.
- Lord, You commended a whole roll of people who never saw the end, and Your Spirit is the one who joins my twelve years to hands I will never shake. The finish is Yours and the afternoon is mine, and I am doing one this week.
Hebrews 11:13
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