He Kept Those Words In The Book On Purpose

He has said the useful things to other people for twenty years, and last month he tried them on himself and they slid off.

He is the one people ring. He is careful, he is patient, he does not offer a verse like an aspirin, and he has sat in a great many kitchens saying true things gently to people in the worst weeks of their lives. He is good at it. He has never once said a sentence he did not believe.

And then it was his own house. And he went without for that particular matter, more than once, and did it quietly and did it seriously, and nothing at all happened, and the thing is still there tonight exactly where it was.

So he did what he would do for anybody. He got the good answers out. God is sovereign. God's timing is not ours. God is doing something you cannot see.

Every one of them is true. He would still say each of them to somebody else and he would mean it. And in his own study, at nine at night, with the window open, they went through him like water through a sieve and left nothing behind, and that frightened him more than the original disappointment did.

And a friend, meaning nothing but kindness, said: have you fasted about it?

He said he had. And what he felt was not hope. It was the particular loneliness of a man who has run out of the thing he is known for.

If your own good answers have stopped working on you, come and sit in here a while. I am not going to try any of them.

No explanation is coming from this page

Let us settle it before anything else, because that is what a man in your position needs to hear in the first minute.

Nothing here is going to tell you why. I do not know why, nobody writing to you knows why, and a person who hands you a reason at this point is giving you their own guess dressed as revelation.

You are not being managed here, and you were never obliged to have an explanation for your own house. That is not a dodge. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been in that study at nine at night, watching a careful man run out of material, and has not once required him to produce a satisfying sentence about it.

And the answers you gave other people were not lies. They are true. They simply were never designed to be load bearing for the person standing inside the thing, which is something you now know from the inside and will make you better at kitchens for the rest of your life.

The psalm that ends in the dark

There is a psalm nobody puts on a card, and its last line is the reason it matters to you tonight.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18

That is the end. There is no turn. There is no yet will I praise Him, no morning, no lift in the final verse. The psalm walks into darkness and stops there and the collection moves on to the next one.

Somebody could have fixed that. An editor could have added four lines and rounded it off, and nobody in three thousand years would have known. You are holding a book that refused to do that. I am not saying it for effect: Psalm 88 is in there exactly as it stands, ending where it ends (Psalm 88:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who saw to it that a piece of honest darkness stayed in Scripture for every person who would one day need to find it there.

That is not God being resigned to human sadness. That is God making room, on purpose, in His own book, so that nobody in your position would ever have to conclude they had fallen off the edge of what faith is allowed to sound like.

And your going without bought nothing

Here is a plain sentence, because a suspicion has been circling it for weeks.

It did not fail. There was no mechanism, so failure was not among the things available to it. It did not come up short of a length, it was not spoiled by a motive, and it did not almost work.

You did not do it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on your faith. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which means He is not a system that yields when it is operated correctly, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight lifting rather than a proposition you would defend.

And nobody here will tell you it will work next time. You would examine that sentence and find it hollow, because you always do.

Now something said in the open rather than in fine print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.