Nigh Is A Distance And He Chose It

The courtyard has the long table in it and the vine over the top, and after a meal like that nobody moves for an hour and a half.

His daughter is arguing with her husband about a road, joyfully, the way people argue about roads. Somebody's boy is under the table. There is coffee coming and there is a dish of something with almonds and everybody is at their loudest.

He is at the end of the table with his hands around a small cup, and he is entirely there, and he is entirely somewhere else.

Sixty-eight. It is the fourth year now. The afternoons are the worst of it and it is coming up to four o'clock.

And what is in him, while the family is being magnificent all around him, is the thing he has never said in confession or to a priest or to his wife of forty years, which is that God has moved.

Not gone. He would not say gone. He has been in church every week of his life and he is not going to say gone.

But somewhere in the second year, the pain built a wall, and God is on the far side of it, and every prayer since has been a man calling across a courtyard rather than a man speaking at a table. And the quiet conclusion under that, the one that has taken four years to set, is that the wall is a report. That a better man would not have one. That the distance is a measurement of something in him.

If you have a wall like that, you know it does not feel like doubt. It feels like arithmetic.

Nigh is a word about where He went

Weigh it first and weigh it whole, because on this site nothing about God gets said until the true thing has been put down at full size.

What this costs is not faith exactly. It is the ordinary company of God, which is different. It costs the thing where you say something to Him in a doorway and it lands. It costs the four o'clocks, every one of them, for four years. It costs you the courtyard, in the sense that you are at the table and not at the table. It costs the honest sentence to your wife, who would be devastated by it. And it costs you an arithmetic you have been quietly doing about yourself, which is that a stronger man would not have a wall.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your fourth year made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the four o'clocks have gone past pain into thinking the family would have easier afternoons without you at the end of the table, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your daughter, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that on his own, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who pull a chair over.

Now, Psalm 34, and I want you to notice that it is a sentence about location.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh unto. Near to. It is a positional word, and it is doing something very specific: it tells you where God has placed Himself, and it tells you what He placed Himself near.

Not near the strong. Not near the ones who are managing. He picks a category, deliberately, and the category is the broken hearted and the crushed in spirit, and He announces that this is where He is standing.

You are inside the one category Scripture names as the place God has chosen to be near. Psalm 34:18 makes it a matter of position rather than of merit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that sentence off a page and sets it down at the end of a long table at four in the afternoon.

Now, the thing that changes a man's arithmetic. A distance is a fact about two positions, and if one of them moved, that is a fact about which one moved.

You have felt a wall going up for four years and you have read it as God going backward. Read the psalm again and see what direction it actually describes. It describes God moving toward. Not toward people who have got themselves together, which would at least be consistent with the way you have been grading yourself. Toward the ones who are crushed.

You have been in the direction He was moving the entire time. That is written into Psalm 34:18, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the nearness is a fact about God rather than a reading of your performance.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because you have had four years of good people saying kind things after Mass.

It does not say the wall is coming down. It makes no promise about the pain or the afternoons or next year, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and any man who is confident about somebody else's fourth year is talking about himself.

It does not say the wall is not real either. It is real. Pain does that to a nervous system and it does it to prayer, and this site is not going to tell you that your experience of distance is imaginary, because it is not, and pretending would be one more thing for you to manage.

And it does not rank you. It does not say your affliction has earned you a better position. It says nigh, and it says it to a whole category, and there is no comparison anywhere in the sentence.

You were placed exactly where He said He would be, and it was not a placement you achieved. Scripture says the LORD is near the broken hearted, and the same Spirit who searches all things is the one who carries that from a psalm into a courtyard.