Head Down in the Grass

The form asks for her religion on the second page, between next of kin and allergies, and she writes Christian without lifting the pen.

It is a routine thing, the appointment. A day procedure, in and out, a lift home arranged. The waiting area is full: a man with a walking stick and a newspaper, a young couple with a baby who has decided the ceiling is fascinating, a woman her own age doing the same form on the same kind of clipboard. The vending machine hums. Somebody's name is called and somebody stands up.

She goes back over the page to check the boxes and her eye stops on the word she wrote. Christian. She would write it again. She believes every part of it, still, if you asked her, and nobody has asked her in a long time. She could pray right now if the man with the stick fell over. She would know exactly what to say.

And sitting there with the clipboard on her knee it comes to her, not as a thought but as a temperature, that she cannot remember when she last spoke to God about anything that was not an emergency. Not the day, not the season. There was no falling out. There was no morning she decided. Nothing happened. She just stopped, and then it had been a while, and then it had been longer, and the word on the form went on being true the whole time.

Her name is called. She stands up.

You are the one with the clipboard. You would write the word. You do believe it. And there is a distance you cannot account for, because nothing caused it, and lately the fact that nothing caused it has become the hardest part, because you feel you ought to arrive with a reason and you have not got one.

A sheep never decides to be lost

I think about sheep more than most people, because a hillside teaches you to, and I want to tell you the one thing about a sheep that matters here.

A sheep does not run away. It has never once, in the history of sheep, stood at the edge of the flock and decided to leave. What it does is put its head down. There is a tuft of grass here, and a better one a little further on, and another past that, and it eats with its head down and its eyes on the next mouthful, and it does not lift its head, and it does not lift its head, and when it finally does the flock is over the ridge and the light has changed and it is somewhere it did not choose. Nothing happened. Isaiah says it exactly: all we like sheep have gone astray, every one to his own way. Not to a far country. To the next tuft.

That is your distance. That is the whole of it. And here is what the Shepherd does about a sheep like that.

He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.Psalm 23:3

Restores is a walking word in the Hebrew: He turns my soul back. And look at the reason given for it, because it is the reason you have been failing to find in yourself. For His name's sake. Not for the sheep's explanation. Not once the sheep can account for the ridge. He turns it back because of who He is, and the sheep's reasons are not on the form.

You are being turned back tonight for the sake of His name, and He never needed a reason from you. That is not my kindness talking; it is written in Psalm 23, and the Holy Spirit still breathes through it, and He is the one doing the turning while you sit there with nothing to say for yourself. The nothing is fine. The nothing was never the price.

The distance is real and it is not a story

Let me be honest about the weight, because I know how it sits, and the Holy Spirit knows it better than I do.

It is not guilt, exactly, though there is some of that. It is that the drift has no shape. You have heard the returns that make good stories, the ones with a rock bottom and a night on the floor, and yours has none of that, and somewhere along the line you decided that a distance with no story is a distance you have not earned the right to close. You would need to explain it first. And you cannot, because there is nothing to explain, so you sit with the clipboard and the true word on the form and a mouth that has forgotten how to open toward Him about small things.

Hear me: the Shepherd does not ask the sheep why. In the story Jesus tells, He goes after the one until He finds it, and when He finds it He lays it on His shoulders, rejoicing (Luke 15:5). There is no interview on the hillside. There is no walk back on its own four feet to prove it means it. He carries it. And the whole time it was head down in the grass, He was already coming across the ridge.

You have a Shepherd already on the ridge, and He is not waiting for your account of the distance. It is written in the same psalm you could still say by heart, and it is His Spirit who has been putting the temperature in you at the waiting room, the small unease that made you look at the word on the page. That was not condemnation. That was a hand on the wool.

The walk back is shorter than the drift

Now the part I most want you to hear, because it is where the distance loses its size.

The drift took a long time because it happened one tuft at a time. The turn does not. A sheep that lifts its head is already facing the Shepherd, because He is already there. There is no long walk back through every field you crossed. There is no retracing. Turning is one movement, and it is a small one, and it is done with the head and not the feet.

So there is nothing to prepare. No speech about the ridge, no summary of the years, no explanation for a thing that has no explanation. Scripture never once shows the Shepherd requiring one, and any voice telling you that you owe Him a reason before you may come near is not His voice. He restores your soul for His name's sake, and His name is not improved by your reasons.

You are not far, you are found, and the finding was His work and not your reconstruction of how you got here. I say that under the word of God and not over it, and the Spirit of Christ is the one making it true in you at this minute, in the chair, with the clipboard. He never needed a reason from you. He needed only the head to lift.