Even There Thy Hand

It is eleven seconds long. His sister sent it in March and it is about nothing, some business with a door that would not shut and a dog that had opinions about it, and he has played it more times than he would tell anybody.

He does not play it for the door. He plays it because of the sound. The way the words fall on each other in the middle of a sentence. The little rise at the end that means she is not finished, she is just breathing. He plays it and stands at the window with the phone against his ear and lets the shape of his own language run through him like heat through a wire.

Thirty one days since he was in a room where anybody said a word of it out loud.

And here is the number he does not say out loud, even to himself, even here: two years and some since he was in a room with another person who believes any of it. Not a service. A room. One other person, at any hour, in any weather, who would have understood what he meant.

You know both of those numbers. You have your own two, and one of them you tell people and one of them you do not.

So somewhere in the second winter you began to suspect something, and it is a quiet, reasonable, entirely wrong thing: that whatever the people of God is, it is a thing that happens at a certain range, and you have gone out past it.

David was running an experiment, and it failed

There is a psalm that gets read at bedsides as a comfort, and it was not written as a comfort. It was written as a test, and you can feel the man pushing on the walls of it.

He is trying to find the edge. He goes up: if I ascend into heaven. He goes down: if I make my bed in hell. Then he reaches for the furthest thing his imagination has, and for a man on that coastline the furthest thing in the world was the open sea going west with nothing on it.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9-10

Even there. Two words, and they are not a flourish. They are the result of the experiment.

He picked the most extreme coordinate he could produce, went to it in his mind at the speed of the light coming over the horizon, and arrived to find the place already occupied. Not visited. Not reachable. Occupied, and by a hand that was leading rather than catching up.

You are held by a hand that was at your coordinates before you had the address, and the distance you have been calculating was never a distance to God. That is the plain result of Psalm 139:9-10 rather than a kindness I am adding to it, and His Spirit is not dispatched after a man the way mail is, arriving late and looking for him.

And notice which hand it is. Thy right hand shall hold me. Not wave. Not signal from a shore. Hold, which is a word about contact, written by a man imagining the emptiest place he could think of.

You were reached for before you were ever far away, and holding is what that psalm has the right hand doing. Psalm 139:10 is written as the result of the test and not as a consolation fastened onto the end of it, and the Spirit was standing on this shore before the shore carried a name on any chart.

Distance is a measurement between two objects

Here is where the arithmetic goes wrong, and it is worth being precise about it, because you are a precise man and a vague comfort is no use to you.

Distance requires two things and a line between them. You have been measuring, honestly and accurately, the miles between yourself and every room where believers are. That number is real. It is large. Nobody is going to tell you it is small.

But that number is a measurement of your position relative to a building, and a building is not what you were joined to. A people is not a place. It has no perimeter, no maximum range, and no falloff, and there is no reading on any instrument you own that says how much of it you have.

Think about water for a minute, because you are looking at it. The bay outside your window is not a separate sea. There is one ocean on this planet and it has one tide, and the water on a shore eight thousand miles from you is the same body of water touching your boots this morning. Nobody stands on a beach and says he has been assigned a smaller portion of the ocean than the people on the far coast. It is not that kind of thing.

You have a full share in a people that has no edge for you to have gone past, and there is no reduced version of it issued to men at your range. The promise of a people gathered out of every nation and kindred and tongue was written down with no proximity clause anywhere in it, and the Spirit does not keep a lesser grade of anybody for use at long range.

And I want to say plainly what this article is not doing, because you have heard the other thing and it is not true. Nothing here treats where you are as a waiting room. This is not a stretch to be endured until you are back within reach of a room, and your share of the people of God is not on hold with your mail. What is true of you on this shore is what is true of you anywhere, at full strength, today.