Followeth Hard

There is a stretch on the way up any long climb where the wanting goes out of it and only the legs are left.

Anybody who has walked a real distance knows this hour. It is not the hardest part physically. It is usually about two thirds of the way, when the novelty is gone and the summit is not yet in sight and the view has stopped being interesting. What happens in that stretch is that the desire drops out entirely. You are not enjoying it. You do not want to be doing it. Your legs are still going because that is what legs do once they are going, and there is nothing else in you at all.

Nobody who has done it thinks that stretch is a failure. It is simply the middle.

Now here is a man in the middle of something else.

He turned back to God about fourteen months ago, and he meant it, and the first stretch had real feeling in it. Something moved in him regularly. Prayer had a temperature. He knew what people were talking about when they described that.

And somewhere in the eighth or ninth month it went quiet.

Not away. Quiet. He still gets up and does the things he does. He still opens the book. He still says the words at night, and they are honest words, and they land on nothing that he can detect. It is not that anything went wrong. It is that the wanting has gone out of it and only the legs are left.

And what he has begun to conclude, in the last three months, is that this means the whole thing was probably not real.

I want to name that wound plainly before I say anything hopeful about it. There is a teaching abroad, never stated outright, that says the presence of feeling proves the presence of God, and its shadow says the absence of feeling proves the absence of God. Nobody put that in a sentence to him. He assembled it from a hundred testimonies about the first stretch, and none of the people who gave those testimonies ever mentioned their eighth month.

That is you two thirds of the way up.

You've got legs still going and nothing else, and you have started reading the quiet as a verdict on the turn you made fourteen months ago.

The verse puts hard following and being upheld in one line

David writes a short line about this exact stretch, and the two halves of it belong together.

My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.Psalm 63:8

Followeth hard. In the Hebrew it is a word for clinging, sticking, staying attached to something with effort. It is not a word for delight. It is a word for the kind of holding on you do when the thing you are holding is not making it easy. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a grip like that from failing.

David is not describing the first stretch. He is writing this in a wilderness. This is the eighth month.

You are doing exactly what that verse describes, and it is named as following rather than as failing, and I am not being generous with the psalm: Psalm 63:8 says followeth hard, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can bring that to a man two thirds of the way up.

And now the second half, because the two clauses are one sentence and the second one explains the first. Thy right hand upholdeth me. While he is following hard, something is holding him up. He does not say his own resolve is holding him up. He says a hand is.

Which turns the whole picture round. In the first stretch it looked as though the feeling was carrying him. In the eighth month the feeling has gone and he is still going, and that means whatever is carrying him now was never the feeling. It was the hand the whole time, and the quiet is simply the first period in which he could tell.

You have been upheld by a hand rather than by a mood, and the fourteen months proved it rather than disproving it, which is written into the second clause rather than into my sympathy for a tired man, with the Spirit of God able to reach a place three months of drawing conclusions has not.

I want to say one thing about my own ground, and I will be careful with it. Where I come from, people say that the land teaches patience, and it does, but the land is not a teacher in itself. It is His handiwork and nothing more, and what it actually shows you is what any long walk shows anybody: that arriving is a matter of continuing, and continuing has almost nothing to do with how you feel at the two thirds mark.

This following counts, in the flat form it has taken since the eighth month, because Scripture calls hard following by that name and puts an upholding hand in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it up a ridge.