Where Is Your Weather

My grandfather kept a log for fifty-one years, and I copied it out.

Not all of it. But four of the books, front to back, in pencil, in a hard-backed exercise book with a green cover, sitting on the end of the bench in the workshop with the light going, when I was between fourteen and about seventeen.

His entries are short. 17th. NE, dropping. Went out at four. Nothing off the point. Tide wrong, my fault. Sometimes a note about somebody's engine. Once, in 1979, in the middle of a page of nothing much: Good day. All of them here.

I copied every word. I copied his abbreviations. I copied the way he did his sevens, which is not the way I do my sevens.

And he came in one evening in the summer I was seventeen and stood behind me with his tea and read over my shoulder for a while, and then he said:

"That is my weather."

I said I know.

He said, "You have been out four times this month."

I said I know.

And he tapped the page with one finger, right at the bottom where there was a good inch of clean paper under the last line, and he said:

"So where is yours?"

I did not have an answer. I had been out four times that month. I had seen a thing happen off the north end that I still think about. And it had not once occurred to me that my four days belonged in a book, because the book was for the real entries and mine were, I suppose, practice.

He did not push it. He drank his tea and went and did something to the outboard.

I wrote three lines that night, badly, in a different pen because I could not find the pencil. They are terrible. 18th. Flat calm. Saw the gannets go over twice, north then back, and something in the water off the north end I could not see properly.

He read it about a week later. He did not say anything about it at all. But he never asked me to copy another one of his books, and thirty years on I have understood that as the compliment it was.

Now let me ask you about your notebook.

Because you have one. It might be a real one with an elastic band round it. It might be the notes app. It might be the flyleaf of a Bible, or a shelf of them going back to 2011.

And it is full of other people's sentences. Verses copied out in your best handwriting. Lines from a message. A quotation from somebody who died in 1743.

And there is not one line in it that is yours.

The word is already in your mouth

Moses gets to the end of a long book and takes away every excuse a person could offer for not having the word of God available to them.

But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it.Deuteronomy 30:14

He has just said it is not up in heaven that somebody would have to go and get it, and not across the sea that somebody would have to fetch it. And then he says where it actually is.

In your mouth. Not in the scroll on the shelf. Not in the mouth of the man who reads it out. Yours, already, in there, available for speaking.

And in your heart. Which is the Hebrew way of saying the inside of a person: what they think with, decide with, feel with. Not a special compartment reserved for religious material.

So hear this over you, with the notebook open. You have the word of God in your own mouth already, and the clean inch at the bottom of the page has been waiting for you rather than for somebody more qualified. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who puts a true thing in a person and then brings it back up out of them, which means what comes out in your own words tonight will not be a lesser grade of material.

Now let me name the wound underneath the copying, because there is one and it deserves saying before anything is asked of you.

Somebody made you believe that your own sentences were practice.

It might have been a person and it might have been a room. It might have been years of hearing beautifully constructed things and quietly working out that the beautifully constructed things were the real ones. But you learned it, and you learned it early, and you have been copying ever since.

That has cost you. Not because a notebook of good quotations is a bad thing, it is a fine thing. Because a person who never writes their own line never finds out that they have one, and after enough years they stop looking down at the bottom of the page at all.

You have been out four times this month. You have seen something you still think about.

The written word says it is in your mouth and in your heart, and the Spirit of God is not distributing that in grades. There is not a better version of it in somebody else's mouth than the one that is in yours.

Let me guard the copying itself, because I am not about to send anybody's notebook to the fire.

Copying is how anybody learns anything. I copied his sevens for three years and I am glad of it. The Psalms are full of people quoting older psalms. Half the New Testament is somebody with the Old open in front of them.

The trouble was never the four books. The trouble was the clean inch that stayed clean.

There was a man five hundred years ago who translated other men's sentences for a living, and then one day, in a room, he wrote a mighty fortress in his own language, out of his own weather, and people who could not read a word of Latin have been singing it in kitchens ever since. He had copied for twenty years first. That was not wasted. It was the apprenticeship.