The Wall We Keep Wiping

Ten past two in the morning, and he is up because the baby is up, and the baby is up in the front room because that is where the cot lives now.

They moved it out of the bedroom in the spring. There is a bloom coming through the wall behind where the head end used to stand, a soft gray map of a country nobody has named, and it always comes back. He wipes it and it goes. By the end of the week it has started again in exactly the same shape.

So he has the cloth in his hand at ten past two most nights. It has turned into a thing he does while he waits for her to settle: wiping a wall that will not stay wiped, in a flat he pays for and does not own.

He has rung. He has emailed. There is a folder on his phone of photographs with the date sitting in the corner of every one of them, and the photographs are very good, and nothing has happened.

His wife is asleep on the settee, because that is the arrangement now.

And he has prayed about this. Not once, and not in a panic. Properly, night after night, out loud, with his hand flat on the cold patch, in the words of a man who genuinely expected to be heard.

Nothing came back. The wall is the same wall. The letter he keeps waiting for has not arrived and the line he keeps ringing rings out.

And somewhere in the last while, without ever once deciding to, he has started reading the quiet. Working out what it means about him. What it says about the two of them, and about whether they are the sort of people God moves for.

That is the part I have come for tonight. If you are doing the same arithmetic in your own dark, put the cloth down a minute and stay with me.

I am not going to explain the quiet

There is something that gets done to people in your situation, and I want to name it before I do anything else, because it will have been done to you and it may well have been done kindly.

Somebody explains the silence. They tell you what God is up to in it. They call it a season, or a lesson, or a delay with a purpose that will make sense to you later, and they say it warmly and they mean every word, and you go home carrying a thing you cannot check and cannot put down.

I am not doing that here. I do not know why that wall is still wet, and neither does anybody who tells you they do. What I do know is written down, and it is this: you are not disqualified, and there is no gate somewhere that you failed to get through. Scripture has a man crying out in the daytime and hearing nothing back and calling God his God in the very same breath (Psalm 22:2), and the Holy Spirit kept that in the book with no explanation attached to it at all.

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.Psalm 22:2

Read what is not in that verse. There is no reason given. There is no lesson, no purpose, no note in the margin telling us what God was doing. The line simply stands, and the man goes on saying my God to the One who is not answering him, and the written word saw fit to leave it there exactly like that for everybody who would ever need to find it at ten past two.

The verdict that gets read off the quiet

Here is what happens inside a person over a long unanswered stretch, and it happens so slowly that almost nobody catches it happening. The silence stops being a silence and turns into a message.

Nobody decides that. Nobody sits down and reasons it out. It arrives the way damp arrives, coming through from the other side, and one night a man is standing with a cloth in his hand thinking: He is not answering us, and there will be a reason, and the reason is probably us.

So let me put a different sentence in that room, and let me say it straight at you. You are not being punished by a wall. The written word says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to that in you at two in the morning when the whole flat is telling you something else.

Notice carefully what that does and does not do. It does not tell you why. It tells you what the quiet is not, which is a different thing entirely, and I am not going to swap one for the other just to make this page end more comfortably.

And His nearness is not a payment you failed to make. You have not been priced out of God, not by a bad stretch, not by a short temper at two in the morning, not by anything. Scripture puts Him near to the brokenhearted with no condition written on the other side of it (Psalm 34:18), and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that, given to you rather than lent.

Near is a separate fact from answered

These two things sit side by side and neither one cancels the other, and holding both at once is the hardest work faith ever does.

The prayer was not answered. That is true. Say it plainly and do not let anybody talk you out of the plain word.

God is near. That is also true, and it did not become true because the first one got easier.

You are not one inch further from Him tonight than you were the first night you prayed about that wall. Not one. The written word calls Him a very present help in trouble, present tense with no waiting list attached (Psalm 46:1), and the Holy Spirit is the proof of it living in you rather than a feeling you have to work up at two in the morning.

I know what the temptation is at this point, because it is mine as much as anybody's. The temptation is to close this off by quietly redefining the answer. To tell you the nearness was the answer all along, and send you back to the cot thinking you got one.

You are owed honesty here far more than you are owed a warm ending. You asked about a wall and you have not got a wall, and Scripture never asks me to tidy that before I hand you anything, and the Holy Spirit is not served in the slightest by a comforting swap.