Rudy is our rooster and Rudy cannot crow.
I want to be careful how I say this because the boy is protective and because it is not funny to Rudy. He tries. He tries every single morning of his life, at the correct time, from the correct place, with the correct posture, and what comes out is a sort of short noise like somebody pulling a nail out of green wood. Then he does a little turn on the spot, which I believe is embarrassment, and then he dances, because dancing is the thing he can do and he is genuinely very good at it.
Deacon Wattles has offered to teach him. That went how you would expect.
We had a truck full of lambs to be at the market by seven, which means leaving at half five, which means the whole house up at five, which for eleven years has meant Rudy going off outside the window like a bad alarm clock that still, technically, works.
That morning he did not manage even the nail noise. Nothing. And nobody woke up.
We came downstairs at ten past six in a great deal of hurry and we did not go, because by the time the lambs were loaded it was gone seven and market is market. I said several things in the yard. Bucky was standing in the middle of it eating the corner off a feed sack and had no view on any of it. Toby fed Rudy, which I noticed, and did not say anything to me about it, which I also noticed.
At about nine the phone went, and it was the man from the next farm along, and the county bridge had gone into the water at ten to six with the rain behind it. Nobody was on it. It went empty, and the two vehicles that would have been on that road at that time on a market morning are mine and his, and he was ten minutes behind me because he always is.
I have not told this story out loud very often. I am telling it now because Toby is nine and has heard people be unkind about that bird in front of him, and there is a thing worth saying about gaps.
The steps are ordered, and the word is small on purpose
The verse people know is short and gets put on things, and it is worth reading in full because the second half is the load bearing half.
The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. (Psalm 37:23)
Steps. Not leaps and not chapters. The unit is the smallest unit a person has, which means the ordering is happening at a resolution nobody can watch.
And the next verse does the thing that makes this a real promise rather than a decoration: Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. It allows for falling. It does not promise a clean walk, it promises a hand.
You are being ordered at a scale you cannot see, and not being ordered is not one of the options. Psalm 37:23 puts the unit at steps rather than at outcomes, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than any evidence in front of you who makes that steady.
That matters here, because nothing about that morning looked like ordering. It looked like a bird failing at his one job, and a family oversleeping, and a load of lambs going nowhere.
You have not been left out of the ordering because your morning looked like a mess. The written word says the steps of a good man are ordered without adding a clause about how they feel, and His Spirit is what makes plain words hold at ten past six.
The men who were late to the boat
There is a scene in the gospels where being in the wrong place is the whole mercy of it.
Jesus sends the disciples across the lake and stays behind on the mountain to pray. They go, and the wind comes up, and they spend most of the night rowing and getting nowhere. Anybody reading it thinks the same thing: they should not have been out there, and He should not have sent them.
And about the fourth watch of the night he cometh unto them, walking upon the sea. (Mark 6:48)
They would not have seen that from the shore. There is no version of that night where they stay in the harbor and get the thing they got, and the thing they got was Him coming across the water, which none of them ever forgot and one of them wrote down.
The wind was real. The exhaustion was real. Mark says he saw them toiling, which is a word about work and not about danger.
You are somewhere you would not have chosen, and it is not evidence that you were forgotten. Mark 6 has Him watching from the hill the whole time, and it is the Spirit of God who makes being watched feel like company rather than surveillance.
You have not been rowing alone through any of it. That is what the passage puts on the page rather than what the men in the boat felt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it from their night into somebody else's.
So here is what I would like said in front of my son, about a bird who cannot do the one thing a bird like him is for.
You are not a list of the things that do not work. Psalm 37 says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a run of good luck who makes that a thing a man can stand on in his own yard.
I do not say God broke a bridge to teach me something, and I would not say it. Bridges go into rivers because of rain and because of iron and because things get old. What I will say is that I was not on it, and the reason I was not on it is a rooster who has never once managed a crow.
You have never been outside the ordering, and the gaps in you are inside it rather than outside it. Mark 6 has Him arriving across the water at the fourth watch rather than at the first, and His Spirit is what makes late arrival read as faithfulness.
And this is for whoever is doing the reading, who has a thing about themselves they have been apologizing for since school. You were made this shape and it was not an oversight. The passage puts the ordering on the Lord in plain words, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes plain words weigh something at the end of a long day.
Declare this over yourself
Say it out loud. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak over the thing you cannot do is genuinely yours, delegated and never invented. God orders the steps of a man and delights in his way, so speak to the shame you have been carrying about it: you have standing to address it because He is the one doing the ordering. An ambassador carries the King's word and never his own policy, so say what God has said and leave the outcome to Him. Every line below is Psalm 37:23 and Mark 6:48 handed back in your own voice, and it is His Spirit, not your volume, that makes saying it a receiving.
- Shame about the thing I cannot do, you are not the whole ledger. The Word of God says the steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, and ordered is a word about somebody else's care and not about my performance.
- Voice that says I let everybody down, you are finished in the name of Jesus. Though I fall I am not utterly cast down, because Psalm 37 puts a hand under a man rather than a warning over him.
- Father, You have been ordering steps I could not see on mornings I thought were wasted. I receive that today, and I thank You that Your word says You delight in the way of a man, which is a strange thing to read about a man like me.
Psalm 37:23
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