Nothing Bad Enough Happened

The list starts on its own, usually somewhere around four in the afternoon.

Your friend's father got his scan back in February. The girl two desks over is doing all of it alone, with a toddler and a car that will not start. Somebody in the group chat lost a job on a Tuesday and had to tell his wife on the Wednesday. You read every one of those. You send the right message with the right amount of care in it and you mean every word, and then you put the phone face down on the arm of the chair and you sit there.

Because none of that is yours.

Your family is fine. Your job is fine. There is a window in your apartment that gets about an hour of sun in the afternoon, and you have watched that hour cross the floor more times than you would tell anybody. Nothing happened. That is the whole problem, and you have turned it over so often it has gone smooth. Nothing bad enough happened.

So there is no form to fill in. There is no box you could check that would explain this to another person, including yourself. When somebody asks how you are doing, the honest answer will not even come up the stairs, because the honest answer sounds like a complaint from a person with nothing to complain about, and you would rather be tired than be that.

And underneath the low place there is a second thing, and it is the heavier one. You are down here without a permit. Everybody else was let in at the door because they had a reason, and you came in without one, so every kind thing anybody says lands on somebody it was not addressed to.

You would not use the word sad. You are not sad. You are carrying something with no name on it, in a life that is objectively fine, and it is the not being allowed that actually gets you.

The door down here has never checked reasons

I am not going to describe the low place. You live in it, a guided tour of it helps nobody, and there is a kind of writing that lingers in the dark because lingering moves people, and it has no business anywhere near this evening.

So I will be short about the depth and long about the reach.

Start with the sentence that takes the permit off the table, and hear it as a fact rather than a kindness. Psalm 103:14 says God knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit did not put a threshold in front of that line. You are known at the actual level tonight, with an empty box on the form and no story to hand anybody at the door.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:13-14

Read the verbs and notice who is doing all of them. He knows. He remembers. He pities, which in that old English is not looking down at somebody, it is feeling it in the gut and moving. Nobody in that sentence fills anything in first.

Then notice what the verse never does. It never asks what happened. Nothing is written there about a threshold, a minimum, a qualifying event, and the Spirit of God did not leave that out by accident. The frame He knows is the whole make of a person, including the plain fact that dust gets tired with no explanation attached to it. What you have been calling a lack of reason is the shape of a creature He built and has not once forgotten.

There is a reason this particular God gets a hearing on this particular subject, and it is not an argument, it is a biography. He did not send word down about dust. He came and wore it. John 4:6 has Him sitting on the edge of a well in the middle of the day because He was worn out from the road, and the account puts it there plainly, with no embarrassment, as though being tired were an ordinary thing for a body to be. You have never once needed to justify exhaustion to Someone who has had it, and the Holy Spirit is in the room to make that land rather than merely read.

So let the permit go. The idea that a person needs a big enough reason before God is allowed to come near is not in Scripture anywhere, and the Spirit who breathed it would have had to leave it out on purpose for the idea to be true. You are not down here illegally, and you were never processed at a door that checks reasons, because there is no such door and there never was one.

One plain thing before we go further, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If the flatness has started to include thoughts of ending your life, or of simply not being here any more, then tell one living human being out loud tonight. A friend, a doctor, a crisis line. In the United States, call or text 988 and a person picks up. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line does the same job. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make you a burden to anybody. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.

Now the list. The arithmetic that starts at four in the afternoon, where your trouble goes up against somebody else's and loses. Comparison is a set of scales, and God has never once weighed a person on it. Psalm 56:8 has Him keeping tears in a bottle and writing them in a book, every one of them, with no column anywhere for what caused them. Nothing in that picture gets filed under insufficient.

And here is what I actually came to say. The reach was never calibrated to the size of what happened. He came all the way into a body and all the way into death and back out of it, which is a distance nobody measures in reasons. So the honest question is not whether the trouble is big enough to warrant the arm. His word does not put it that way, and the Holy Spirit does not either. The reaching is happening at the real depth, this evening, in a life with nothing to declare at the door.