I Thought I Would Outgrow It

It comes at half past four, the way it has come at half past four since she was nineteen, and she is seventy-three and sitting in the slat backed chair with a blanket over her knees, and there it is again.

The sun is coming in low under the porch roof and laying a stripe across the boards. There is a glass of tea sweating on the rail. Somebody left the hymnbook face down out here two days ago and it has been rained on once. And the ache arrives on schedule, in her chest, exactly where it always sits, and it is not grief and it is not indigestion and after fifty-four years she knows precisely what it is.

She wants God. Not a doctrine about Him and not a fuller understanding of Him. Him. The way a person wants the sound of a door when they are waiting for somebody to come home.

She first felt it at a camp meeting in a field, in the second week of August, standing at the back because she had come with a girl she barely knew. It knocked the wind out of her. She assumed at the time that it was a thing that happened to nineteen year olds and would settle down.

It did not settle down. It came in the years she was raising children, at half past four, over a sink. It came in the two years she was angry at God and would not have admitted this to anybody. It came on the day of the funeral, and it came on the day of the wedding, and it comes now on an ordinary Tuesday with beans in jars on the step.

And here is what she has never said to another living soul. She is embarrassed by it. At her age. People come to her now. Younger women drive out here to sit on this porch and ask her things, and they leave saying she is so settled, so at peace, and she smiles and lets them say it, and then they pull out of the drive and it is half past four and she is sitting here wanting God like a girl at the back of a tent in a field.

She has taken that as a verdict. Fifty-four years and she never graduated. Everybody else seems to have found the level place where you know what you believe and it does not pull at you anymore. She looks at people who seem calm about God and she cannot tell whether she envies them or is afraid for them, and she has never worked out which.

So she sits with the tea going warm and the stripe of sun moving along the boards, and she does what she has done for half a century. She waits for it to pass. She has never once in her life let it stay.

Maybe your hour is different. Maybe yours is in the truck at the end of the road, or in the kitchen after everyone has gone up, or on a Sunday afternoon that has too much light in it. But you know the hour, and you know the ache, and you have quietly concluded that a grown believer would not still be having it.

Whose mouth this is in

I want to show you who is talking in the psalm, because I think you have assumed it is somebody at the beginning.

My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.Psalm 84:2

Longeth. Fainteth. Crieth out. Heart and flesh, which is the whole person, inside and outside, nothing held in reserve. That is not measured language. If one of those young women said that on your porch you would want to know if she was all right.

Now look at who wrote it. That psalm carries the name of the sons of Korah, and they were temple people. This is not the language of somebody who has never been near God. It is the language of people whose whole working life was conducted in His house, who knew the courts by heart, who could have told you the schedule and the shape of every stone in the place. And the psalm they left us is fainting.

So the ache at half past four is not a beginner's condition that you failed to advance out of. It is the sound made by people who are close.

You are not stuck at nineteen, and the ache is not a mark against your growth. I am not saying that to spare your feelings. Psalm 84:2 puts fainting and crying out in the mouths of people who lived at God's own house, and the Holy Spirit is the One who reads that to a woman of seventy-three in a slat backed chair who thought she was the only one who never leveled off.

And notice what she has been comparing herself to. She has been looking at people who seem calm about God and reading their calm as maturity. Some of it is. Some of it is not. There is a settledness that comes from being long with Him and there is a quiet that comes from having stopped expecting anything, and from a distance on a Sunday morning the two look very much alike. The psalm is not calm. The psalm is a grown, trained, temple-dwelling man saying his flesh cries out.

You have the language of the people who lived closest to Him, and it has been coming out of you at half past four for fifty-four years. Psalm 84 is written by singers who worked in His courts, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes their words and shows a woman that her own ache has been quoting Scripture without her permission.

Aimed, not cured

Now here is the part I am not going to lie to you about, and I want to be very plain, because a page like this usually ends with a promise it cannot keep.

The hunger does not get cured. I am not going to tell you it goes away this afternoon or at eighty or ever. Read the psalm to the end and you will see that it does not resolve the longing either. It calls the one longing blessed. It says they go from strength to strength. It says a day in His courts is better than a thousand elsewhere, which is a sentence written by somebody still counting days, still comparing, still wanting more of the same thing.

But it does something with the hunger that nobody ever did for her at a camp meeting in a field. It aims it.

Because here is the trouble with an unaimed ache. It goes looking. It will attach to the next thing that passes, and the next, and a person can spend forty years feeding a God-shaped hunger with things that were never the size of it and concluding each time that they are ungrateful. She has done some of that. So have you.

You are hungry for the living God Himself, and that is the address the ache has been trying to reach the whole time. Psalm 84:2 says the heart and the flesh cry out for the living God, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an ache with no name on it and writes the name on it in a porch chair at half past four.

And once it is aimed, it changes what you do with it at the hour. She has spent fifty-four years waiting for it to pass. What she has never done, not once, is stay in the chair and let it be a knock on a door that opens.

You were never meant to outlast this hunger, and you are meant to be in the room with it. The written word calls the longing one blessed and never once tells him to stop, and the Holy Spirit is the One who turns a thing you have been enduring into a thing you keep.