The Walk Home With Nothing In It

The bus puts her down at the top of the road at twenty to seven, and it is ten minutes from there to her door, and Charmaine has done those ten minutes about four thousand times.

She gets her headphones out before her feet are off the step. This is not a decision. It is a reflex, the way you reach for the light switch in a room you have lived in for years.

And it is the reliable one she puts on. Not the sad one, not the loud one, not the one for a bad day. The one that works. The one that has carried her up this road through every kind of week there is, the one that gets her chin up by the second corner without fail.

Second corner. Nothing.

She turns it up a little, which is what you do, and keeps walking. Past the wall with the ivy on it. Past the car that never moves. And it is not that it hurts. That would be something. It is that it is doing absolutely nothing at all, and she can hear every word and every turn of it, and it is going straight through her like weather through an open window.

She gets to her gate with it still playing and stands there for a second with her key out and her hand not moving.

The song ends. Another one starts, a good one, one she would have called a favorite, and she already knows before the second line that it is going to do exactly the same amount of nothing.

She takes the headphones out. It is very quiet on the road. Somebody two doors down is rolling in a trash can.

You are the one at the gate with your key out and the sound off. Whatever your version of that walk is, it has stopped lifting, and nobody did anything wrong, and you have no idea what you are supposed to do with the next ten minutes.

It did not betray you. It ran out.

The first thing I want to do is take the accusation out of the room, because there are two of them circling and neither is from God.

The first says the thing itself was wicked. Not necessarily. Most of what people go to is perfectly ordinary. It is a job, a screen, a person, an hour that belongs to nobody else, a routine, a silence, a road with headphones on. There are as many of them as there are people, and a great many of them are not sins at all, and treating yours as one is a detour into a shame that was never issued to anybody.

The second says the thing betrayed you. It did not. It was finite. It only ever had a certain amount in it, and it gave you that, faithfully, for a long time, and tonight you reached the bottom of it and heard the sound a thing makes when there is nothing left to draw.

You are not being punished tonight, and nothing about the flat hour is a sentence handed down on you. I am not softening that for your comfort. Psalm 107 is where the picture comes from, and the Holy Spirit is the one who let you hear the emptiness rather than leaving you to keep drawing on a well that had already gone dry.

I want to say one plain thing here, and then keep going, because it matters more than the rest of this page. If the flatness tonight has gone heavier than flat, if something in you has started saying it is not worth turning for, then before anything else, tell one real person tonight, out loud, and let them stay with you. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local emergency number or crisis line. That is not a step away from God. It is exactly how He has always sent help, through a human being who turns up at the door. Then come back to this page.

He satisfies the longing soul

Here is the verse. Read the second half slowly, because that is where the whole thing turns.

For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.Psalm 107:9

Longing and hungry. Not the fed soul. Not the soul that has its act together and comes with a good report. Psalm 107 is a whole psalm about people at the end of what they had, four different groups of them, in four different kinds of trouble, and the same line comes round again and again: then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble. Then. Right at the bottom. Not after they had recovered enough to be presentable.

And what does He fill them with? Goodness. Not with an explanation. Not with a lecture on why the well went dry. Goodness.

You have a God who has not run out, and there is no bottom to Him for you to reach on some future night. That is what Psalm 107 is saying and I am only pointing at it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it land in a woman standing at a gate with her key out.

Hear the difference in kind, because it is everything. What you went to had a quantity in it. He does not have a quantity. He is not a larger version of the reliable thing, holding more; He is a different sort of thing altogether, and He is called the fountain and the living water and the bread, and none of those are described anywhere as running low.

This is yours, and it is settled: the longing in you tonight is not evidence against you. It is written that He satisfies the longing soul, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that longing alive in you the whole time, precisely so that you would still be able to feel a night like this one instead of sleeping through it.

The hour it goes flat is a door

Now here is the part I am most eager for you to have, and it is about timing.

The assumption sitting under the last ten minutes is that there has to be a wait. That the getting together comes first, that there is a better hour further along, a Sunday, a morning, some point at which anybody would be more presentable than a woman at a gate with nothing in her. That is not in Psalm 107 anywhere. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses. In it. Not after it.

So the flat hour is not the disqualifier. The flat hour is the door. It is the one moment when your hands are empty enough to take something, and hands like that are exactly what heaven has been waiting for, and I mean waiting gladly and not grudgingly.

You are welcome at Him at this exact hour, in this exact condition, with nothing in your hands at all. Psalm 107 says He fills the hungry, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has walked you all the way down this road to a gate where you would finally be empty enough to be filled.