As Far As That

There is a street she does not live on any more and she drives down it about twice a month.

Not on purpose, she would tell you. It is on the way to somewhere. Except that it is not, quite, and the somewhere could be reached by a road that is four minutes quicker, and she takes the slower one, and she slows further at a particular point without ever admitting to herself that she is slowing.

She does not stop. She has never stopped. She goes down at twenty five, looks at a door that is now painted a different color, and comes out at the junction and rejoins her life.

That street is where a stretch of her life happened that she brought to God eight years ago. Properly. Not casually. She remembers the room she was in and she remembers what she said and she remembers meaning it more than she has meant anything.

And every fortnight she drives down and looks at the door.

If you asked her why, she would say something about not wanting to pretend it never happened. And there is something honorable in that, which is why the habit has survived eight years: it feels like integrity. It feels like the alternative would be a kind of forgetting she has no right to.

But watch what it actually does to her week. She comes off that street tighter than she went in. It is not reflection. Reflection leaves a person more settled. This leaves her with her jaw set and the radio suddenly annoying, and she is not better for it, and she has never once come away with anything she did not have before.

There is a difference between honoring the truth about your life and returning to stand in front of it. She has been doing the second and calling it the first.

That is you at twenty five miles an hour.

You've got a street, or a photograph, or a stretch of a certain month you go back over in bed. And you have decided that going back is the honest thing, and that not going back would be a lie. So you keep making a journey God has already measured the distance of, and you come off it tighter every time.

He gave the measurement, and He chose one you cannot drive

David could have said God puts our sins a long way off. He does not say that. He gives a measurement, and the measurement is doing something very precise.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

Now think about that as a distance, because it is not a poetic flourish, it is an exact choice.

North and south are finite. There is a north pole. Travel far enough north and you start going south, and the two ends meet, and the distance can be stated in miles. East and west never meet. Travel east as long as you like and you never arrive at west and you never begin going west. There is no point at which the two touch.

He picked the one distance in creation that has no crossing point.

You are separated from this by a distance that has no return road, and that was measured once and cannot be re-measured, and I am not being sentimental with a psalm: Psalm 103:12 chose the immeasurable axis on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can bring that to a woman driving at twenty five.

And look at the verb. Hath he removed. Past tense, completed, and God is the subject. You did not carry it out there. He did, once, and He is not in the habit of re-siting things He has already placed.

You have been driving a route God has not laid, and there has never been a road from here to there, which is written into the measurement rather than being my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to loosen a hand that has taken the same turn for eight years.

Here is the thing about the honesty argument, because it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal. You are right that pretending it never happened would be a lie, and I would never ask you to. But nothing about receiving the mercy requires you to pretend. The event is in your history. It is simply no longer in your account, and those are two different ledgers. History is what happened. An account is what is outstanding. God did not edit the first one. He cleared the second.

Your history is intact and your account is empty, and holding both of those at once is exactly what mercy looks like, because Scripture removes the transgressions rather than the memory, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that liveable rather than only clever.