The Light Was On All Winter

There is a lane I know that runs about a mile between hedges, and at the end of it there is a small stone building with one window facing the road.

The light in that window has been on every evening since October. Not brightly. It is one bulb in a porch and the glass is old, so from the top of the lane it looks like somebody has left a candle going in a house that went to bed.

There is a woman who walks that lane most evenings with a dog, and who has not gone in.

She turns at the gate. Every time. Sometimes she stands there a minute, and the dog waits, and there is a particular sound that a lane makes in winter which is mostly water going somewhere under the hedge. Then she turns back and walks the mile home in the dark.

If you asked her, she would not say she has stopped believing. She would tell you something quieter and much harder to answer. She would say she is waiting until she can go in without her face doing anything.

That is the actual barrier. Not doubt. Composure. She has decided, without ever deciding it, that turning up in that doorway requires her to be able to speak in a level voice and hold a cup and answer a question about her winter without the answer breaking somewhere in the middle. And she is not there yet. She has not been there for a long time. Some evenings she is further from it than she was in November.

So the light is on and she is at the gate and the dog is waiting, and both of them go home.

Here is the thing about that porch light. Nobody turns it on for an occasion. It goes on at four when it gets dark, because the step is uneven and somebody could fall. It has been on all winter for reasons that have nothing to do with her, which is exactly why it has been on all winter for her.

That is you at the gate.

You're not waiting for proof and you're not waiting for an argument. You're waiting to be steady. And the steadiness keeps not arriving, and every month you do not go in, the going in gets bigger, and the amount of composure you would now need has quietly doubled.

The nearness in the psalm is aimed at the state you're in

I want to go slowly here, because this is the sort of thing that gets said quickly and then does not land, and you've had enough of things said quickly.

Read who this verse is about. Not what they have done. What condition they are in.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

The nearness is not offered to the composed. It is not held out as a reward for those who have got themselves together enough to present properly. It is aimed, deliberately and specifically, at the broken heart and the crushed spirit, which is to say at the exact state you have been waiting to grow out of before you were willing to be seen.

You are the person that verse is about, in the condition you are actually in this evening, at the gate, with your face doing whatever it does. I am not smoothing that over: Psalm 34:18 names the state in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a gentle sentence who can bring it the last mile down a lane.

Sit with what that does to your arrangement. You have been holding a door shut from the outside on the grounds that you are not fit to come through it, and the fitness criterion you invented is the very thing the verse names as the qualification. Not a qualification you earn. A condition He draws near to.

I know something of how that arrangement feels from the inside, and I am not going to rush you off it. The waiting is not laziness and it is not pride, whatever anybody has told you. It is usually the last dignity a person has left, and letting go of it feels like losing the final thing.

You have nothing to hold together at that door, and the holding together was never the entrance requirement, which is written in the psalm rather than being my hope for you, with the Spirit of God able to loosen a grip that reasoning has only tightened.

Notice the word contrite as well. In the Hebrew it is crushed, the way something is crushed to powder. It is not a word for somebody performing remorse well. It is a word for somebody who has been ground down, and the verse says God saves such as these, which means the grinding down is not an obstacle to the saving. It is the address.

This nearness is yours right now, on the wet part of the lane, with a mile still to walk if you turn back. Scripture is what settles that and not my sympathy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a fact you can act on rather than a comfort you appreciate.

And the light. The light in that window is not on for an occasion. It has been burning since October for reasons that predate your winter entirely, which is what makes it a genuine welcome rather than a staged one.