The Right State I Never Arrived At

She has a whole procedure. She would be embarrassed if anybody watched it.

Light the candle. Put the phone in the other room. Sit with her hands still and breathe until the noise in her head goes down. Read something first, to settle. And then, when she is in the right condition, actually begin.

The trouble is the condition. She has been doing this for six years and she cannot remember arriving at it more than a handful of times. Usually the noise stays, and she keeps trying to settle it, and after twenty minutes she has run out of time and has not yet started, and gets up feeling like somebody who queued at the wrong window.

She would not put it this crudely, but the shape of it is a threshold. God is on the other side of a certain quality of stillness, and she has to get there under her own power before anything begins, and most days she does not get there.

Nobody taught her that in words. She absorbed it the way people absorb reverence, out of the air, from good rooms and quiet people and books she loved.

If you have been preparing for years and rarely feel you began, come and sit in the garden a minute. Nothing about your reverence is going to be treated as silly here.

The instinct is right and the arithmetic is not

Let us be fair to the thing you built, because it did not come from nowhere.

The instinct underneath it is reverence, and reverence is right. Something in you knows this is not casual, and that instinct is good and I have no wish to blunt it.

What went wrong is only the order. Reverence became a runway, then the runway became a requirement, then the requirement became a threshold you have to clear before He is available. And a threshold in a person's own hands is a very hard thing to see, because it feels like devotion right up until the day you notice you have not been through it.

You are not standing outside a door waiting for your own stillness to admit you. Nothing about the state of your mind has ever set the terms of His nearness. I am not saying that to relax your reverence. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18), and the ones He is described as being near are specifically the ones who have not got themselves together, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a woman twenty minutes into an unquiet head.

Look at the state of the people He came to

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a shorter preparation.

Go through the Gospels and look at the condition of the people Jesus arrives beside. A woman in a crowd, unwell for twelve years, ceremonially unclean, reaching out from behind. A father shouting over a crowd about his son. A thief on a cross with hours left. A man in a tomb among the stones.

Not one of them prepared. Several of them could not have.

You are met in the condition you are actually in, and there is no preliminary He is standing behind. That is written into every one of those encounters and stated plainly in the Psalm above, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a woman who has spent six years trying to settle her own head first.

Do not turn this into a technique either

Something has to go where the threshold was, or by Thursday you will have a better and quicker preparation, which is the same doorstep with a shorter path to it.

So let us name what is actually there instead.

You have His nearness as a fact about Him rather than an achievement of yours, and it does not fluctuate with your concentration. Scripture says draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you (James 4:8), where drawing near is turning toward Him rather than reaching a state, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has been in that room for six years of unsuccessful settling without waiting once for the noise to stop.

And if the last while has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.