The Same Page for an Hour

The rain came in at about two and it has not stopped, and the window seat is the best place in the flat when it does that.

She has the cushion behind her back and her knees up and the book propped against them, and the tea is on the sill beside her, and the tea has been on the sill for an hour.

She is on page eighty one. She has been on page eighty one for most of that hour. Her eyes go along the lines and reach the bottom and come back up to the top, and nothing sticks, and she does not mind enough to stop.

Outside, the road shines. A car goes by slowly with its lights already on. Somebody's bin lid is loose and the wind keeps lifting it and dropping it, and she counts three lifts and then stops counting.

Nothing is wrong. That is the thing about the afternoon she cannot get past. The job is fine. Her health is fine. Her mother rang on Thursday and they laughed about something the neighbor said. There is food in the flat, the rent went out on the first, the boiler works.

And into that quiet, uninvited, comes a small plain thought. I have not said anything to God in a long time.

There is no heat in it. It arrives the way you notice a picture has been hanging slightly crooked for months. She turns it over and she cannot date it. No argument, no bad year, no night she decided anything. She still believes it. She would say so to anybody who asked.

She lifts the mug, and the tea is cold, and she puts it back down on the sill.

You know that window seat. Nothing is wrong where you are either, and that has somehow become the hardest part of it.

Quiet is not a measurement

I work in quiet rooms. It is most of what I do: I make spaces where a person can hear themselves think without being asked to perform anything in return, and I have learned one thing in them that I want to hand you before anything else.

A quiet room tells you nothing about who is in it.

Sit with somebody dearly loved and say not one word for an hour, and the room is full. Sit alone and say not one word for an hour, and it measures exactly as quiet. The silence is the same size. What is in it is not.

So when you sit in the window and notice that you have not said anything to God in longer than you can date, you are reading a silence, and you have already drawn the only conclusion the silence seems to allow: that the quiet is the distance, and the distance is as wide as the quiet is long.

It is not. You are not far this afternoon. You are quiet, and quiet has never once been a measurement of distance. I am not being kind to you and I am not making it up. It is written into Jeremiah 31:3, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line first spoken over a ruined and scattered people and sets it down warm in a room with rain on the glass.

The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Read the middle of that again. Therefore. The whole verse turns on that one word, and everything depends on which side of it the drawing sits.

The therefore is His

In that sentence the love comes first and the drawing comes second, and the therefore in between is God's reasoning and not yours.

He does not say: account for yourself, therefore I will draw you. He does not say: produce a crisis worth the name, bring me something with a shape to it, therefore I will come. He says He has loved with an everlasting love, and therefore, on the strength of that and of nothing else at all, He has drawn.

Which means the drawing is not something you are about to begin. It is in the past tense in the verse and it is in the past tense in your afternoon. That small plain thought arriving uninvited while the tea went cold was not you starting something. It was you noticing something that had been going on for a while.

You have been drawn already, and the drawing did not wait for you to work out what happened. That is the order Scripture puts it in and I am not free to reverse it, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been doing the slow quiet work of it in you, under the noise, on the ordinary days, for as long as it has been going on.

Now the part I want to say carefully, because it is where people like us go wrong.

I am not going to hand you a reason for the distance. I could invent one easily. Busyness, or a disappointment never gone back to, or simply the shape of a temperament, and you would probably nod, because a reason is a comfort of a sort. But a reason you did not walk in with is a debt you did not owe, and I am not putting one in your hands on the way through the door. If there is something real down there, God is gentle and He is thorough and He will do that Himself, in His own hour.

You are received without a reason, and there is no version of this where somebody hands you a form first. Scripture never once shows a person made to produce an explanation before God will come near, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the edge of this afternoon waiting for your account of it.

There is no corridor

Here is what most people are actually braced for, and I would like to take it off you.

The brace is for a corridor. Something long and formal with doors off it: a period of rebuilding, an interview, a quantity of feeling that would have to be produced before any of it counted, somebody to tell, an announcement to make. Nobody says this out loud. It sits under the skin as a sense of scale, and the sense of scale is exactly why the afternoon goes past with the book open and nothing said.

There is no corridor. There is a sentence.

That is not a technique and it is not a shortcut. It is the shape God has always used with people who have gone quiet. He speaks first. He speaks near. And the answer that reaches Him is short. The Lord is near to all them that call upon Him, says Psalm 145:18, and the verse adds no clause whatever about how well they call.

You are one plain sentence away from having spoken, and you were that close for the whole hour you sat in the window. Psalm 145:18 is the ground under that and not my own warm opinion, and it is His Spirit who carries a sentence out of a quiet room and the whole way to the Father, whatever it sounds like on the way out.

Nothing has to be announced. Nobody has to be told. You are not required to feel anything as you speak, and a person who says it and feels precisely nothing has received exactly as much as a person who cries. Feeling is weather. What God has settled is climate, and weather has never once been permitted to rewrite the climate it passes through.