This morning’s word is The Gap.
The anchor verses are Mark 8:25 and 2 Kings 5:14.
Jordan Matthew is twenty-two years old. He drives a beach shuttle on Elmer’s Island, on the Louisiana coast. This week a young boy and two women, a family visiting from Oklahoma, were pulled out past the break by a rip current near Caminada Pass. None of the three could swim. They were exhausted, fighting to stay above the water, and they thought they were going to die.
Matthew learned what was happening, took off his shirt, and went in.
He did not bring all three out at once. He reached the boy first, where one of the women was holding him up, and carried the boy to shore. Then he went back for the first woman. Then he went back a third time for the second woman, and officials said he had to pull her the last of the way. Three trips into the same water. Nobody came out on the first reach.
That is the picture for this morning. The rip current is the gap. It is the place where you are pulled from where you meant to be, where fighting straight ahead only wears you down, where the help comes in stages and not all at once.
The Bible is full of that gap, and we read past it because we already know how the stories end. We see the rescue in two verses and forget the long minutes in the water.
The Day Thirteen reading from ResLife Church on whether GOD heals today gathers them in one place. Naaman, the commander with leprosy, dipped himself in the Jordan seven times before his skin was clean, with no change until the seventh. Six dips under the water with nothing to show for it. Elijah stretched himself over a dead boy three times before the breath returned. He prayed for rain in a three-year drought and sent his servant to look seven times before a cloud the size of a hand rose off the sea. Jesus laid hands on a blind man, and the man saw people like trees walking. It was not finished. Jesus laid hands on him again, and then he saw clearly.
Read them slowly and every one has a gap inside it where a person could have quit and called it failure.
The disciples quit in one of them. At the base of the mountain, a father brought his troubled son, and the disciples could not help him. They had been sent out to heal, but here they prayed, saw what looked like failure, and stopped. When Jesus came, HE addressed the boy, and the boy convulsed and went still as a corpse before he rose. The appearance of failure did not move HIM. HE pushed through the place where the disciples had let go.
Kris Langham, in the Discipology step on disciples as learners, points to Job, who wanted GOD to show up and explain, and who got GOD HIMSELF instead of an answer. Langham asks it plainly. If you had a choice between knowing the answers and knowing GOD, which would you choose. The gap is where that question gets asked. It is the stretch of water between the promise and the sight of it, the place where most people decide GOD has said no when GOD has not said anything yet.
Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, knew a gap with no rescue boat in view. He was in chains, walking toward the wild beasts, and he staked his life on a Christ who truly suffered and truly rose, not one who only seemed to. That is faith in the gap. Not faith that the water is shallow, but faith that the One who entered it is real.
The gap is not proof that GOD has changed HIS mind. The disciples treated the hard moment as a verdict, and they were wrong. Naaman almost treated six empty dips the same way, and he was wrong. The believer who hits resistance and reads it as a closed door is reading too early. The story is not over at the gap. The story is fought through it.
Jordan Matthew did not stop after the boy. He went back, and he went back again, until all three were on the shore.
What gap are you standing in this morning. What have you started to call a no, when GOD has only asked you to stay in the water a little longer. Do not throw it away where you cannot yet see the end. The cloud was the size of a hand on the seventh look. The sight came clear on the second touch. The rescue came on the third trip back.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.