Awake And Sing, You That Dwell In Dust

The tide is a long way out and the flats are shining, and there are two boats over on their sides where the channel runs, waiting for the water like everybody else.

He is at the top of the beach on the bench his uncles put there for somebody else years ago.

Fifty-seven. Four years since it turned.

His nephews are down on the sand doing something to an upturned hull with more shouting than the job requires, and one of the small ones has been sent up to sit with him and is telling him about a fish, at length, with movements.

He is not sad. He wants that on the record, because everybody assumes.

But there is a phrase that arrived last spring and has stayed, and it goes: I am going back to dust ahead of schedule.

That is exactly the shape of it. Not dying, necessarily, not soon. Just the thing where a body starts returning to the ground in stages while a man is still using it, and everybody else his age is still out there on the sand shouting about a hull, and he is on a bench being told about a fish.

Dust ahead of schedule.

If you have found a phrase for yours, you know how well it fits, and you know you would not use it out loud in front of the family.

Dust is the address on the envelope

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never trimmed to get there faster.

What this costs is not the beach. It is the arithmetic of stages. It costs you the ordinary assumption that the returning to the ground happens at the end rather than in installments while you are watching. It costs the sand, and the hull, and the shouting, which you can hear perfectly from where you are. It costs you the phrase itself, which is accurate and which is now living in you. And it costs the honest sentence, which you will not say in front of a family that would take it as a farewell.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if dust ahead of schedule has gone further than a description, as far as thinking the family would have easier summers without a bench at the top of the beach, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the nephews, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who send a small one up to sit with you.

Now, Isaiah, and read who the sentence is addressed to.

Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.Isaiah 26:19

Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.

That is a vocative. It is a sentence spoken to somebody, and the somebody is identified by their address, and the address is dust.

Not: awake and sing, you who are nearly there. Not: this promise applies once you are properly finished. The people being spoken to in that line are described, at the moment of being spoken to, as dwelling in dust, and the imperative is given to them in that condition.

You are being addressed in the exact condition you have found a phrase for. Isaiah 26:19 names the dwellers in dust as the ones being spoken to, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old prophet's imperative and carries it up a beach to a bench.

Now, the verb, because it is not what you expect. Awake and sing. Not awake and wait. Not awake and be still. Sing, which is a thing done with a body, out loud, before anything has visibly changed.

You have an instruction that assumes the dust is where the singing starts. That is written into Isaiah 26:19, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an imperative like that survive three thousand years and land on a man watching a tide.

And there is one more thing in that verse that a man on a bench should have. The earth shall cast out the dead. Cast out is not a gentle word. It is the word for the ground giving something back that it has been holding, and the ground is not the one who decides.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because four years of good sentences have already been said on that beach.

It says nothing about your body this summer. It does not predict a change, it does not hint at one, and I will not predict one either, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and any man who is confident about somebody else's fifth year is being confident about himself.

And it does not tell you the phrase is wrong. It is not wrong. Bodies do return to the ground and yours is doing it in a way that you can see, and this site is not going to argue with a man about his own eyes.

What it does is tell you what the address on the envelope is. It is dust. You had assumed the promise was for people who were somewhere else.

You were never outside the group the sentence was written to. Scripture calls them ye that dwell in dust and speaks directly to them, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it to a bench at the top of a beach.