Renew Is A Verb He Wants Asked For

One candle, because the bulb went in the lamp three weeks ago and neither of them has replaced it and it has become a thing they like.

Three of them in the room. Somebody has brought bread and somebody else has brought a book with a mark in it because there is a passage they want to argue about.

He is sixty-six.

Seven years. It has taken the walking and most of the traveling and all of the getting up early, and the getting up early was the part that mattered most because that was where he met God for forty years.

And a thing has happened inside that he has never described to anybody, and he has thought about how to describe it and has failed, and the nearest he can get is: it has gone the same color as the rest of it.

The interior life. The part that used to be a country he went to. It is gray now in the way his mornings are gray, and it has been gray for about two years.

And here is what he does not do about it. He does not ask.

Because you ask for strength when you are in his position. You ask for grace to bear it. You ask for the people you love. There is a whole architecture of appropriate requests for a man in a hard season, and it does not include asking God to make something new in you, because that sounds like a young man's prayer, or a well man's, and he is neither.

If your inside has gone the same color as your outside, you know that you have not asked, and you know that nobody ever told you not to.

He asked for it outright

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the walking or the traveling, though seven years has taken both. It is the country. It costs you the place you went to for forty years at five in the morning, which nobody in your life knows was a place and which cannot be explained to anybody who has not had one. It costs you the words for it, because you have tried and failed to describe what happened. It costs the mornings, which were the meeting and are now the hardest part. And it costs you a prayer you have never prayed, because you have quietly ruled it out of order.

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 seven years 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 gray has gone somewhere darker, tell one living person today. Your doctor, either of the two in this room, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Nothing on this page is medical advice and nothing here would call getting help a lack of faith. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who bring bread and a book with a mark in it.

Now, Psalm 51, and read what David asks for and consider what position he is asking from.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.Psalm 51:10

Renew a right spirit within me.

He asks. Outright, in the imperative, for an interior renewal, and he uses the word create, which in Hebrew is the word from the first line of Genesis and which is used almost exclusively of God making something out of nothing.

And consider where he is standing when he asks it. This is the psalm after the worst thing he ever did. He is not asking from a position of strength or of merit or of a good season. He has less standing to make a request than almost anybody in Scripture, and what he asks for is not endurance and not grace to cope. He asks for a new thing inside him.

You are looking at a man in the worst position of his life asking for exactly what you have ruled out. Psalm 51:10 asks God to renew a right spirit within, and the Holy Spirit is named three verses later in the same prayer.

Now, the word within, because it settles the location. He is not asking for circumstances and he is not asking for a feeling. He asks for something to be made new in the interior, which is precisely the place you have been describing as gray, and he asks for it as a thing God does rather than a thing he can produce.

You have permission on the page, from a man who had none of the other kind. That is written into Psalm 51:10, and His Spirit in you is the one that psalm goes on to name in the very next breath.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because seven years of good sentences have already been said in that room.

It does not promise you a feeling. Renewal in that psalm is not a mood and David does not describe one, and I am not going to tell you that the country comes back or that five in the morning becomes what it was, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you that asking for strength was wrong. It is a good prayer and Scripture is full of it, and the Holy Spirit has carried every one of yours. What that verse does is remove a rule you have been obeying that nobody wrote down and that nobody can show you.

And this renewing is not a swap. Nothing in that psalm offers an interior renewal as compensation for a diminished body. It is additional and it is not a trade.

You were never handed a shorter list of prayers because of your condition. Scripture has a man in the worst position of his life asking outright, and the same Spirit who is named in that psalm is the one who carries it into a room with one candle in it.