You Did Not Weave the Net

The tannoy says a gate is closing and nobody in the queue can hear which one, so two hundred people all look up at once and then all look back down again.

He is holding his son's coffee. That is the job he has been given, because holding the coffee is a thing a father can do while the bags go through. Nine months. A rig off a coast neither of them can pronounce properly. The rucksack at the boy's feet still has the strap that has needed fixing since he was nineteen, and neither of them ever fixed it, and now neither of them will.

Then his hand goes to his pocket.

Not a decision. Nothing was weighed. There was no argument he had with himself and lost. The hand simply goes, the fingers find the shape they know, and he hears his own voice say the sentence he has said in a hundred rooms: "I'll get some air. Back in a minute."

Outside there is a yellow line painted on the concrete and four strangers standing beyond it in the cold, all doing exactly what he is doing, none of them looking at each other. He is back inside in six minutes and the queue has barely moved, so he goes out again. When he comes back, his son is already past the desk and halfway up the escalator with his hand raised.

He got there. He got a hug in, at the bottom of the moving stair, and he turned his face a little to the side while he did it, the way he always does, so the boy would not get the smell of it. Then he watched the escalator take him up.

Eight minutes. They had eight minutes left together and he spent them on the far side of a yellow line with four people he will never see again.

And you know this, or you would not still be reading. Maybe your yellow line is not painted outside an airport. Maybe it is the back step, or the far end of the car park, or the two minutes you take before you put your key in your own front door. But you know which pocket. You know the weight of the thing in it and the shape of it through the fabric, and you know the sentence you say on your way out of the room, because you have been saying it for years and nobody has ever once questioned it.

Back in a minute.

The bird did not break the snare

Let me say the part you do not say out loud, so you do not have to be the one who says it first.

You know the number. How many days, or how many weeks, or how many times you have started the number again. Or you knew, and then you stopped counting, because the counting had become its own weight and you were carrying two things instead of one. You have made promises in car parks. You have thrown things away and gone back for more of the same thing on the way home, and the walk back is the part nobody sees. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 124:7, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

And what it is actually costing you is not the thing everyone lectures you about. It is the eight minutes. It is that this thing keeps sending you out of rooms you wanted to be in, out of the kitchen, out of the conversation, out of the last quarter of an hour with somebody you love, and you never once agreed to be sent. You are a man or a woman with a life full of thresholds, and something else has been deciding when you cross them. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 124:7, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Here is where nearly all of us go wrong, and it is not a small wrong. We decide that the problem is us. Not the thing. Us. Our weakness, our softness, our failure of character. And then we take that verdict into every prayer we pray, which is like going to a doctor and apologizing for the wound.

Read this slowly. It is old, and it is about a bird.

Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.Psalm 124:7

A snare is an engineered thing. A fowler was a craftsman, and his craft was knowing the bird better than the bird knew itself: what it eats, where it lands, which way it bolts when it panics. He did not build a general trap. He built one for that species, in that grove, at that hour. The bird was never in a fair fight, and the net was never a comment on the bird's character.

So hear it plainly: your being caught is not a verdict on you. It is a description of the net. Something was designed to hold, and it held, and being held by a thing built to hold is not a moral failure. It is what nets do.

Now read the second half of that line, because everything is in the order of it. The psalm does not say the bird got stronger. It does not say the bird tried harder in its second year, or found the right method, or wanted freedom badly enough at last. It says the snare is broken, and we are escaped. In that order. The breaking comes first, and it is done by Another, and the escaping is what follows.

Freedom there is not an achievement. It is a consequence.

I want to be careful with you, because there is real work in this, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There are doors to shut and hours to fill and people to tell, and God uses every bit of it. But none of it is the hinge. You have been asked, every Monday morning of your life, to be stronger than a thing that was built to be stronger than you, and you have been calling the result a character flaw. The hinge was never your grip. The hinge is a hand that breaks nets. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 124:7, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

And that hand has not retired. This is not a psalm about a closed era with the miracles all safely in the past. When Christ stood outside a tomb and called a dead man out, the man came out alive and still wrapped head to foot in the grave clothes, and Jesus turned to the people standing there and told them to loose him and let him go. Alive, and still bound, and the unwrapping put into ordinary human hands. So when God sets a doctor in your path, or a service, or a friend who answers the phone at ten at night, that is not a lesser thing than prayer and it is not a failure to trust. That is the loosing, done the way He usually does it.

And notice who the psalm is about. Not a hero. The word is our. Ordinary people, in the plural, none of them named, who were caught and are out. There is nothing in that sentence that holds the door shut against you.