A Low Place With No Story Attached

The porch light is still burning and it is eleven in the morning.

You noticed it around seven and you meant to reach up and pull the chain, and then you sat down in the rocker with the coffee, and you did not get up again. Now it is eleven. The light is on. The coffee is cold in the cup and there is a skin on it, and this is not the first Tuesday this has happened.

Somebody asks how you are doing. You say fine. The strange part is that you are not even lying, because nothing has happened. That is the whole trouble. Nothing has happened.

There was no accident. Nobody left. No diagnosis came in the mail. There is no month you can put your finger on and say, there, that is where it started. There is only a long quiet run of years, and somewhere in the middle of them you went down, an inch at a time, so slow that no single day of it would have made the news in your own kitchen.

The hummingbird feeder on the rail has been empty since August. You can see it from where you sit. Four minutes and a cup of sugar water. It has been eleven months.

And here is what you have worked out, sitting there, and it is the thing that keeps you sitting there. People get helped when something happened to them. There is a casserole for a funeral. There is a prayer chain for a diagnosis. There is a name for what a person is carrying when the thing can be named.

You have no name for this. You have no story to hand anybody. And a low place with no story attached, you decided somewhere around the second winter, is not a low place at all. It is just how you turned out. It is a personality. It is nothing worth spending a neighbor's Tuesday evening on.

So you keep the porch light burning at eleven in the morning and you tell them fine, and the hard part is not that nobody is coming.

The hard part is that you have quit believing there is anything to come for.

He Comes To A Place, Not To A Reason

Let me say the plain thing first and then stay on it, because the low place does not need describing to the person living in it. There is a kind of writing that lingers down there because lingering moves people, and it has no business anywhere near your porch this morning.

So here is the plain thing, and it is short. You are reachable this morning with nothing attached to it, no explanation, no incident, no case made. That is not my kind opinion of your situation. Isaiah 43:2 puts God with a person in the water and in the fire and never once asks how the person got there, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding that line open over the chair you are sitting in.

Read it before you decide whether it is talking to you.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.Isaiah 43:2

Now look at what is missing from that sentence. There is a water in it and there is a fire in it, and there is not one word about how either one started. No cause. No fault. No account of the years leading up. The verse names a location, and then it names who is standing in it, and that is the entire architecture of the thing.

He promised the going through. He did not promise it to the ones who could explain themselves. That sentence is addressed to a location and not to a case file, and the Spirit of God who breathed it out knows the road, the porch, the hour, and the eleven months of an empty feeder better than the neighbors do.

Think about how differently the two kinds of trouble get treated down here. A man falls off a roof in October and there is an ambulance in the yard inside of twenty minutes. A woman settles half an inch a year for eleven years and there is nothing, ever, because there is no day on the calendar to send the ambulance to. The going down was real in both cases. Only one of them came with a story.

You have not been quietly disqualified for lack of a story. When Elijah went down, 1 Kings 19:5 says the first thing heaven sent him was not an explanation and it was not a questionnaire. It was bread, and water, and sleep, and a hand on his shoulder, twice, before one word of conversation happened. The same Spirit who saw to that is in this room, and He has never once required a person to make a case before He came near.

And one plain thing said straight, because it matters more than the rest of this page. If the low place has thoughts of ending your life in it, or of simply not being here anymore, then tell one living human being out loud tonight. A neighbor, a doctor, a pastor, an emergency line. In the United States, 988 will answer a call or a text at any hour of the night. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line will do the same thing. Reaching for that is not a failure of faith, and nobody who picks up that phone is a burden to anybody. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and calling one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.

Now back to the conclusion drawn on that porch, because it is the load-bearing one, and it is wrong. You are not a personality that turned out this way. You are a person the Lord is near to, and Psalm 34:18 says He is near the brokenhearted without putting one adjective in front of broken and without asking for paperwork, and the Holy Spirit has been that near through the whole eleven months that got counted as nothing.

Do not let anybody turn this into a project, either. A person who has gone down an inch a year does not need a plan with six steps in it. The plan is the thing she has been failing at since March, and failing at it is most of what convinced her the trouble was her.

So hear the claim of the whole business, because it was never about how far down a person went. He goes to the location. You were reached this morning at the actual depth, with no story attached and no case made, and Isaiah 43:2 is where that is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it across the porch boards to the chair.