She has a photograph from the middle of it and she cannot look at it.
Not because it is a bad photograph. She is smiling in it, on a stage, mid song, arm out, and everyone around her is clearly having the time of their lives, and it was a genuinely good night and she remembers it.
It was taken in a two year stretch during which she was completely certain that God had gone quiet on her personally.
Not on the church. The church was fine. Things were happening in that room every week and she was not faking any of it, and that is what makes the photograph unbearable: she meant it, and she was empty, and both of those are true at once and she has never been able to hold them together.
So she has filed those two years. The abandoned years. She does not tell stories from them. When somebody mentions a night from that period she changes the subject, because she cannot work out how to describe a season where God was plainly at work in a building and plainly absent from her.
If you have got a stretch you have filed like that, come and sit down at the end of this table. Nothing is going to be explained to you here.
The two things were both true
Let us hold them together, because holding them apart is what has made those years unbearable.
You meant every word. That is one. And you were running on empty and nobody knew. That is the other. Both are true, and Scripture is entirely comfortable with people in that exact position, and neither the written word nor the Holy Spirit ever called one of them a fraud or asked them to pick.
What went wrong is not the emptiness. It is the conclusion you drew from it: that a person who feels nothing must have been left.
You were not abandoned in those two years. Nothing about the emptiness was God stepping back, and nothing that happened in them put you outside His reach. I am not saying it to be kind. The written word says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), stated as a permanent arrangement rather than a response to how a week went, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold in a woman looking at a photograph she cannot look at.
The place the psalm could not find
Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a way of reinterpreting your two years.
The psalmist sets himself a game. He tries to name a place where God is not, and he goes at it seriously, working outward from the ordinary to the extreme.
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:8
He picks the two furthest points available to his imagination and God is at both. Then he tries darkness, and the answer comes back that the darkness and the light are both alike to Him.
He cannot find one. The whole psalm is a search that fails, deliberately, and it was written down and sung as a comfort rather than as a defeat.
You cannot name the place He was not, and your two years are not the exception the psalmist could not think of. That is written down as a completed search, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a woman who has quietly nominated a stretch of her own life as the one gap.
Nothing is being added to it
Something has to be said plainly here, because a section like the last one usually comes with a theory close behind.
I am not going to tell you what those two years were for. Not building your character, not hiding you, not preparing you for what came after. Every one of those sentences turns a hard season into a curriculum, and the person handing it out was not in the room.
You have one claim in this article and that is the entire content of it: He was there. Nothing else is being said about your two years. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit (Psalm 139:7), and the question stands open with no answer available anywhere in the psalm, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who was on that platform on the night the photograph was taken.
And if those years left more behind than anybody 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.
So here is the turn, and it is not an interpretation of your two years, because I do not have one.
God was in that place and you did not know it. He was near you on the emptiest night of it, and nothing that happened in those years put you outside His reach. The written word says if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there (Psalm 139:8), which is the most extreme address available and the answer did not change, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that true about your actual two years rather than about hard seasons in general.
I cannot tell you what God does next about how you remember them. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that the photograph is not a picture of an abandoned woman, and that the emptiness was never a report on where He was.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You speak these standing in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of what you felt while you sang. What it rests on is the written word, and what makes it living is the Holy Spirit rather than merely resolved, and what God does about those memories, and when, is His, in His own way, and nothing written here knows what that is.
- Two years on that platform, you are a stretch of my life and you are not the season God went quiet on me. Hebrews 13 says He has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, put as an arrangement and not a response to how a week went, and the Holy Spirit held it through every night of it. In the name of Jesus I take you out of the abandoned file.
- Conclusion that a woman who feels nothing has been left, God's word about me does not read like you, and you are not sitting at this table tomorrow. Psalm 139 is a man trying to name a place God is not and failing at both ends of the universe, and His Spirit was on that stage on the night that photograph was taken. I am naming the two years out loud tonight.
- Father, if I make my bed in the lowest place there is, behold, You are there, and Psalm 139 chose the most extreme address it could find. I thank You that Your Spirit never once treated my emptiness as a report on where You were. Here are the two years by their dates, out loud, and here is one sentence to You about them.
Psalm 139:8
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