Through, Not Around

She had a picture and nobody gave it to her on purpose.

The picture was that a life lived properly, with God in it, went around the worst things. Not a charmed life; she is not naive and she has buried people. But a route. A way of going that meant the deepest water was for other people, or for a season, or for somebody who had made a mess of things.

She never said it out loud. It was under everything, the way a foundation is under a house, and you do not look at a foundation until something in the walls moves.

And she is sixty-one and she is standing in it up to her waist.

The details are hers and they are not going in this article. It is enough to say that it is the deep water, and that it arrived without any warning she was able to read, and that it has been going on long enough now that she can no longer think of it as an interruption in her life. It is her life.

And what has broken is not her faith. That is the strange part and she has been surprised by it.

What has broken is the picture. The route around. And nobody warned her that when a foundation goes you do not only lose the foundation; you also lose the thing you thought you were standing on, which is different and takes longer to notice.

The preposition in the promise

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee (Isaiah 43:2).

Read it and count the times the word through appears.

Three. Through the waters. Through the rivers. Through the fire.

Not around. Not instead of. Not spared. Through, which is a preposition about going into something and coming out the other side, and it is used three times in one verse as though the writer wanted to be sure nobody misread it.

That verse has been on cards and calendars for a hundred years and almost everybody who has ever read it has quietly read it as a promise of protection from. It is not. It is a promise of company in.

You are being promised presence in the water rather than a route around it. That is what the preposition says three times over, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an accurate reading bearable, because Scripture calls Him the Comforter, which has always been about presence inside a thing.

Where the picture came from

Now let me say something kind about the foundation that went, because you did not build it deliberately and half the people you know are standing on the same one.

A route around gets assembled out of good things. Out of watching people who love God have good lives, which many of them do. Out of testimonies, which are almost always told from the far side and rarely from the middle. Out of sermons that ended well because a sermon has to end somewhere.

None of that is dishonest. It is simply that the middle of things does not get described very often, and a person listening builds a picture out of what they are given.

You are not naive and you did not fail to read something obvious. The word says in the world you shall have tribulation (John 16:33), and Jesus said it plainly and to people who had left everything to follow Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a hard sentence like that steadying rather than frightening.

They shall not overflow thee

Now here is what is actually promised, and it is not small and it is not what the picture promised.

They shall not overflow thee. Overflow, in the sense the word carries there, is about being swept away, submerged, carried off by it.

So the promise is not that the water is shallow. It is not that you will be dry. You are up to your waist and the verse never once suggests you should not be.

The promise is that the water will not take you.

That is a different guarantee and it is a much harder one to feel and it is the one that is actually offered.

You are not going to be swept away, and that is what is promised rather than dry ground. Scripture says the rivers shall not overflow thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a body standing in deep water, because He is described as the earnest of an inheritance, which is a guarantee held during rather than after.

And I will keep it plain, because you would not thank me otherwise. Nothing here says the water goes down. Nothing here explains why it arrived and I am not going to make your life into a lesson to tidy the sentence. What is settled is the preposition, and the company, and the promise that this does not take you.