Upstream Of Everything I Have

Aoife has not been to a service in nine years and she has never stopped walking the hill.

She goes up the water. That is the phrase her father used and she has never found a better one. You take the path along the burn from the bridge and you keep the water on your left and you go up, and it gets narrower and louder and then narrower and quieter, and after about fifty minutes there is nothing but a seep in the peat and a sound.

Her friend Bel came with her in March. Bel is a talker and had not walked the whole way up before, and about two thirds of the way she stopped and said, genuinely, "Where does it actually start?"

Aoife said, "That's what we're doing."

The spring is not dramatic. That is the thing nobody expects. There is no pool and no rock face and no cascade. There is a patch of moss about the size of a kitchen table where the ground is darker than the ground around it, and if you get down and put your ear near it you can hear it before you can see it.

Bel got down. She is not a person who gets down on wet ground. She did it anyway and she was quiet for a while, and then she said, "That's the whole river."

That is the whole river. Everything down there. The bridge in the village, the pool where the kids swim, the fish, the two farms that take off it, the mill that has not turned since 1958 but is still standing because of what the water did. All of it is this, an hour up a hill, coming out of moss.

Walking back down, Bel said the thing that Aoife has been thinking about ever since. She said: "Nobody down there ever comes up here."

They do not. There is no reason to. The water arrives at the bridge and you use it. And the whole village lives on something whose beginning almost none of them have ever seen or even wondered about.

Aoife did not say anything to that, because she was busy being hit by it. Nine years of not going to church, and every single thing she had left behind had been in the register of demand. What was expected. What was required. What she was falling short of. And it had genuinely never occurred to her that there was another end of it, an hour up the hill, in the moss, that nobody had ever walked her to.

You have been meeting this whole subject at the bridge. Down where the water is used and measured and argued about, where somebody is always telling you what you owe for it. And nobody has ever taken you up the burn to the place where it comes out of the ground and does not ask you for anything at all.

There Is A Source End Of This

There is a line in the Psalms that reads like a sentence somebody wrote sitting beside water.

"For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light."Psalm 36:9

Not a reservoir. Not a supply. A fountain, which in the old sense means a spring, a place where a thing begins.

That single image reorganizes the whole subject, because a spring does not take. A spring cannot take. The only relationship you can have with a source is downstream of it, and the only truthful thing you can say when you get up there is: so this is where it comes from.

You are downstream of something you did not start, and you have been standing at the bridge assuming the water was a bill. Psalm 36 puts the beginning of life on His side and never once puts a meter on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line from an old song and walks a person up a hill with it.

And notice the second half of that verse, because it is the part that does the quiet work. In thy light shall we see light. You do not see the source by concentrating harder. You see it by standing in something that was already shining. Even the noticing is downstream.

You were shown this rather than working it out, and the noticing itself arrived from somewhere. That is what the written word says about how anybody ever comes to see anything, and it is the Spirit of God who does the showing, usually somewhere quiet and usually while a person is doing something with their body like walking.

Nothing Is Asked At The Top Of The Hill

Here is the part that matters most if you left, and a lot of people reading this left.

At the spring there is no collection. There is no requirement and there is nobody standing there. There is moss and a sound and cold, and the only thing available to a person up there is to notice.

That is not a softer version of the subject. It is the actual beginning of it, and everything that was ever handed to you as an obligation came from a long way downstream of this.

So let this page be exactly as clean as the top of that hill. Nothing here asks you for anything. No amount, no proportion, no practice, no attendance, no commitment, and nothing routed to any person or work at all, this one included. There is no second page and there is nothing behind this.

You are welcome up here with empty hands and a nine year gap, and the water does not check. The written word never once meters the fountain, and His Spirit is the one who has kept the ache in you alive through all those years when nothing else about it was working.

And say the other half of it too, gently. You have not been failing something up here, because there is nothing at a spring to fail, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a mood or a good week who is making that read as rest instead of as a technicality.