Nobody Announces a Shift Change

The yard smells of diesel and wet tarmac, and he walks the length of it with his bag on his shoulder the way he has walked it more times than anyone would bother counting.

It is ten past five and the light is going. The lamps down the row come on one at a time, each on its own timer, never two together, so the yard lights itself in pieces while nobody stands there watching it happen.

He hands the bus over between stands four and five. Keys, ticket roll, two sentences. The wipers drag on the low setting. Right, says the other man, and swings up into the cab and pulls the door, and that is the handover, the whole of it, and the 21 goes out toward the ring road with somebody else driving it.

In the canteen the urn is grumbling and the radio is on low and a leaving-do notice is pinned to the board with a pen hanging off a string underneath. He sits down with his tea and puts both hands round the cup and lets his shoulders come down.

It arrives while he is sitting there, sideways, the way these things do. He could not tell you when he last said anything to God. Not the year. Not the season. Not a shift.

There was no falling out. Nothing was decided. He would tell you now, straight out and without blinking, that he believes every word of it, and he would not be lying. He simply stopped saying things, at some point, on some run, and the next thing he knew it had been a long while.

He looks out through the window at the yard with all its lamps burning now and thinks: that is exactly how it went. It changed hands quietly, between stands, and nobody made a speech about it.

You know that canteen. Yours might be a counter, a stairwell, ten minutes in a parked car before you go in and start. Something changed hands and nobody announced it, and now you have decided you must be able to say when, and you cannot, and that is the thing standing in the road.

Nothing at a depot changes hands with a speech

I keep the fourth watch, three in the morning to six, and I have spent a lot of it awake in cities while other people hand the world over to each other. Cleaners going in as security comes out. Bakers on while the buses are still cold. A nurse writing three lines on a chart and going home. Nobody claps. Nobody announces anything. The world changes hands in small movements between two tired people, and it happens perfectly, every night, without ceremony.

So when a man tells me he cannot point at the moment God got far away, I do not hear a man with a bad memory. I hear a man describing a handover, accurately.

And here is what the prophet says about that exact kind of distance, said to a people who had every reason to brace for a lecture.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Look at the verb. Drawn. In the Hebrew it is the word for hauling on a rope, pulling a net in, drawing water up out of a well. It is not a shout across a yard. It is steady pressure on a line tied at the far end long before anyone noticed the slack.

You are being drawn tonight, and you have been drawn the entire time you thought you were only drifting. That is not warmth I am inventing over you. It is written in Jeremiah 31, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a hand on that line, and He has never once let it go slack enough to lose you.

The distance has no logbook

Every vehicle in that yard has a sheet. Who took it out, who brought it back, what the mileage was, what was wrong with the wipers. If you wanted to know exactly what happened to that bus on any night of the year, somebody could find out in four minutes.

The distance does not have a sheet. That is the part that has been quietly working on you. You assumed, without ever putting it into words, that coming back to God involves handing something in. An account. A summary. A reason that would hold up if anyone read it back to you. And there is nothing to hand in, because nothing happened, and so you sit with the cup in your hands and do not start.

Hear me carefully, because this is the hinge. God is not at a desk waiting on your sheet. The verse does not say I drew thee once thou couldst explain thyself. It says with lovingkindness have I drawn thee, and the drawing is the only action in the sentence, and it belongs to Him.

You have a Father whose kindness is the pull on the line, and the paperwork was never part of it. It is written in Jeremiah 31:3 and it was written under the Spirit of God, and the same Spirit is reading it to you now, in whatever room this found you in, with your hands round something warm.

The turn takes about as long as the handover

I want to be exact about the size of this, because the size is where people get lost.

The drift took a long time. Of course it did. It was made of a thousand small quiet handovers, none of which announced itself, and you cannot undo a thousand of anything by going back through them one at a time.

But look at what actually happened between stands four and five. A man held out his hand. Another man took what was in it. Eleven seconds, maybe twelve. The bus that had been his all afternoon was somebody else's, completely, and nothing was signed and nobody watched.

That is the size of the turn. Not a road. A handover. Paul stood up in the middle of a city full of altars and told a crowd of complete strangers exactly how close God was standing.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.Acts 17:27

Though he be not far. Not once you have walked far enough. The seeking in that verse is a man feeling around in the dark for something already within arm's reach, and Paul says it kindly, in public, to people who had never met him.

You are standing at the moment the keys change hands, and both hands are already in the same place. Acts 17 puts that in writing and the Holy Spirit is the nearness the verse is describing, which means the distance you have been sizing up all this while is a distance He has already crossed.