Somebody Already Wrote the Words

It is a quarter to five and you are at the kitchen table with the small lamp on, because putting the big light on felt like too much.

You have tried to pray four times since Sunday. Every time it came out as a list. Thank You for the house. Thank You for the job, which is still there, technically. Thank You that it is not worse than it is. And every time you got to the end of the list, the actual thing was still sitting in your chest with no name on it, so you said amen and went to bed.

That is the problem, and you have never said it to anybody, not even to yourself with the words in the right order. You do not know how to say where you are.

The tidy version comes out fine. You gave somebody the tidy version on Friday and they said they were glad you were doing better, and they meant it, and you let them keep it. The tidy version is roughly true. It is also about four floors up from where you actually live.

And there is no ladder between those two floors made out of words. You have looked. Every sentence you try either overstates it, which feels like lying, or understates it, which feels like lying as well, and the silence in between is where you have been praying from since Sunday.

So the mug is going cold and the lamp is on and the book somebody gave you two Christmases ago is where you put it down last night.

You open it in the middle, the way people do, and the middle of that book is not a story. It is a songbook. And the page it falls open at begins like this.

Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord.

Read it again, because the first line is not an introduction. It does not clear its throat. It does not begin somewhere reasonable and work its way down to the hard part after a paragraph of context. It starts at the bottom, in deep water, with a man who has clearly been shouting for a while before anybody switched on the recording.

And here is what goes through you at a quarter to five, before you can stop it or make it sound sensible.

Somebody has been down here.

Somebody has been down here, and they were not tidy about it, and they wrote it down, and it got kept.

Somebody Was Down Here With a Pen

Psalm 130 does not sit on its own. It belongs to a set of fifteen that run together near the end of the book, and every one of them carries the same heading: a song of ascents, a song of the going up.

They were traveling songs. People sang them on the road to Jerusalem for the feasts, climbing, getting higher with every mile, and the collection is arranged for that walk.

You are holding a going-up song that opens underwater, and that is not an accident of filing. Psalm 130:1 puts the cry in the depths and leaves it there, and the Holy Spirit who kept that psalm in the collection through three thousand years of hands kept it for somebody at a kitchen table at a quarter to five.

Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice; let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading.Psalm 130:1 and 2

The word the psalm uses for depths is a water word. It is what these songs reach for when they mean water over the head, the place where a man puts his foot down and finds nothing under it. It is not a poetic way of saying difficult week.

So the songbook has a floor in it, and somebody was standing on that floor when they wrote, and nobody cleaned it up before it was handed in.

And you have been given the prayer that starts there. It is written into the middle of the collection, at the bottom, under the water, and the Spirit of God is the one holding it open in front of you this morning.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not ask how the man got there. It does not open with a summary of the situation for the benefit of anyone listening. It does not grade the depth or check whether it qualifies.

It cries out from inside the depth, which is the one thing somebody along the way taught you was not allowed until you could explain yourself first.

There are two depths in your week. There is the one you described on Friday, and there is the one you live in. Everybody has both. Almost nobody says so.

The distance between those two is where you have been for months, and it is exactly the distance this line closes. His word does not start at the presentable depth, it starts at the real one, and the Holy Spirit does not need the tidy version before He will pray it with you.

Now, plainly, before we go on, because this page is read by people at the bottom of real things. If what is in your chest tonight includes wanting to be gone, tell one living human being before you sleep. In the United States, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line. That call is not a failure of faith, and the person answering it is not being burdened. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for those hands is obedience, not defeat.

Read four lines further into the psalm and it answers the objection that has never made it out of your mouth.

If You, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared.Psalm 130:3 and 4

That is the objection, named by the psalm before anybody can raise it. If a ledger decides who gets heard, then nobody gets heard, and the man in the water knows it.

You are not being weighed at the bottom of this. Psalm 130:4 says there is forgiveness with Him, said out loud in the middle of the going-up songs, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write that line is reading it over you at that table.

Then think about what happened to the line after he wrote it.

It was copied. It was sung. It was carried out of one burning city and into another. It was set down by people who had no idea anybody like you would ever exist, and it was kept anyway, in order, in the middle of the songbook, at the bottom, under the water, where somebody would need it.

You were included in the keeping of it. Every hand that copied that line copied it for a stranger it would never meet, and His word outlasted every one of those hands, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the line arrived at the table you are sitting at now.