The Walk That Always Worked

He parks in the same place, nose in, third bay from the gate, because the third bay is the one where the door opens properly.

The walk is six miles and it has not changed in years. Up the lane past the farm, out onto the cliff path, along the top with the sea on his left doing whatever it is doing that day, down the ninety steps to the beach, back along the road in the dark. An hour and forty at his pace. He could do it with his eyes shut and some evenings he very nearly does.

It works. That is the thing about it. Whatever he takes up the lane he does not bring back down the road, and he has never had to explain it or defend it to anybody, and it has held him through more than he would ever tell you about.

Tonight the light goes early, the way it does in October, and there is a good wind, and the sea is loud at the bottom of the steps, and he stops at the top of them the way he always stops.

And nothing happens.

He does the rest of it anyway, and he is thorough about it. Down, along, back. He even goes the long way at the end, past the boatyard, to give it every chance.

At the car he sits sideways with the door open and one foot still on the gravel and the keys in his hand, and he is exactly the same man who got out of it two hours ago. Nothing went out of him. Nothing came back in.

He thinks, without meaning to think it: I could just do it again.

You know that car park. Whatever yours is, and it is not mine to name, it gave you nothing back tonight, and here you sit with the keys in your hand.

What you went to was not the enemy

I am not going to name your thing, and I would like you to notice me not naming it.

It is not mine to name and I genuinely do not know what it is. It might be a walk. It might be work, or a screen, or a room with the door shut, or a person you ring, or a silence you keep so carefully that nobody has ever noticed you keeping it. For some people it is a thing they would hate to say out loud. For a great many people it is something completely ordinary and even good, and that is the harder version, because there is nothing to be sorry about and it has still gone flat.

So here is the first thing, and it is meant kindly and it is also just true: what you went to was not the enemy. In a great many cases it was a mercy. It held you when something had to hold you, and it did the job for years.

The trouble with it was never that it was wicked. The trouble is that it has a bottom, and tonight you found it.

You are not in any trouble for having gone there, and there is no charge waiting for you at the end of this page. That is not me being soft with you. Scripture keeps a whole psalm for a man whose soul is cast down and who says so out loud without one line of self accusation in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who saw to it that the psalm was in the book, in the middle, where a person would find it on an evening like this one.

Deep calls to deep

The man who wrote Psalm 42 is at water too, and he is not pretending about the noise of it.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Yet the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.Psalm 42:7-8

Deep calling to deep. Something outside him is loud and something inside him answers it, and he does not tidy that up, and God did not ask him to. The waves are over him and he says so on the page, and the psalm was kept and copied and sung for three thousand years with that line still in it.

Then look at the hinge. Yet.

Not: therefore I felt better. Not: therefore I went round again and it worked the second time. Yet the Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me. Commanded and given, both of them, by Someone who is not the man in the water.

You have a God who commands lovingkindness in the daytime and hands out a song in the night, and neither one of them is a thing you have to generate at the bottom of ninety steps. Psalm 42:8 is the ground under that and not my own encouragement, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a song into a person at the hour when nothing they own is producing one.

And then the last four words of it. The God of my life. Not the God of his good evenings, or the God of the walks that worked. The God of the whole of it, the flat October ones included.

The turn is smaller than the walk

Here is the thing about the hour it stops working: it is the best hour there is, and almost nobody treats it that way.

While the thing was still delivering, there was no reason to look anywhere else, and that is not a moral failure, it is just how people are built. The flatness is not a punishment for having gone there. It is the floor becoming visible, and a floor you can see is a floor you can stand on and turn around on.

And the turn is a movement, not a journey. Stand up. Face a different way. Say one sentence toward God. That is the whole of it, and it takes about four seconds, and it does not require you to feel anything at all while you do it.

You have somewhere to go at the exact hour it stopped working, and it is not a place you have to travel to. It is written in Psalm 145:18 that the Lord is near to all who call on Him, with no clause about the state they are in when they call, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a sentence out of a car park with the sea still loud behind it.

Nobody has to be told. Nothing has to be announced. There is no room to walk into and no service to sit through before this counts, and a person who says it and feels precisely nothing has received exactly as much as a person who is undone by it. Feeling is weather. What God has settled is climate, and weather has never once been allowed to rewrite the climate it passes through.

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 that nothing is 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. Then come back to this page.