The One That Survived

She had not planned to stop. That was the thing she kept noticing about it. The chapel is on the way home if you take the low road, and she had started taking the low road about two years ago without ever making a decision to.

Marianne parked on the gravel and left the bag on the passenger seat. The door of the chapel sticks at the bottom and you have to lift it slightly with the handle, and she knew that now, the way you come to know a door.

Inside it was going amber. Plain glass, no color in it at all, and at that hour the light comes flat along the tops of the pews and lies there, and the dust hangs in it and does not appear to move. There is a radiator under the window that is cold from April to October. There were four hymnals stacked wrong at the end of the second row and she straightened them, as always, and then sat down at the back with her coat still on.

Twenty minutes. It is always about twenty minutes. She does not pray in any way she could describe to somebody at work. She does not read anything. She sits at the back with her hands in her lap and she is not sure that anything happens, and then she gets up and drives home and makes dinner.

She is forty-six. She has watched almost everything she used to want go quiet.

Not tragically. That is what makes it hard to talk about. The ones that came in, came in, and she is glad of them and they are good. The ones that did not come in, mostly stopped hurting, one at a time, over about a decade, the way a bruise stops. There were four or five that had been enormous once, that she would have said she could not live without, and she had lived without them, and now when she thinks about them it is like reading the diary of a girl she used to know and is fond of.

She had expected that to feel like a loss. It mostly felt like a room being cleared.

And then this. One thing left standing in the empty room, and it had not gone quiet at all. If anything, it had gotten louder as the others thinned out, and it is the one she cannot say out loud, because there is no way to say it that does not sound either pious or unwell. There is no plan you can make out of it. There is nothing to do about it. It is not achievable and it is not a goal and it does not fit anywhere on a list of things a sensible woman of forty-six is working toward.

She wants God. That is the one that survived.

The light came off the tops of the pews and went up the wall and then it was gone. Somebody's car went past on the low road. Marianne sat in the dark of the back pew a minute longer than she meant to, with her coat still on and her keys in her hand, holding the only desire she had left and having no idea, none at all, what a person is supposed to do with it.

The one that would not burn off

Let me tell you what you have been carrying, because I think nobody ever has.

You have a desire that has outlasted your other desires, and you have been treating it as an oddity in your temperament. Something to be discreet about. A private eccentricity that turned up after the more reasonable wants had thinned out, and which you have been holding at arm's length because it has no use, no plan attached, and no way of being satisfied that you can point to on a Tuesday.

That is not an eccentricity. That is the psalm.

One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.Psalm 27:4

Read what he asks for. Not deliverance, and David had enemies. Not an outcome, and he had several urgent ones pending. He asks to be where God is, to look at Him, and to keep asking. Those are not achievements. There is no completed state described anywhere in that verse.

You are carrying the same one thing David carried, and it is the healthiest desire in your whole history rather than the strangest. Psalm 27:4 puts it in the mouth of a king in the middle of a war, which settles the question of whether it is a want for people with nothing else going on. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes that written line and lays it against a woman sitting in a back pew at dusk with her keys still in her hand.

Notice also that David is not embarrassed. He says it out loud, into a song, in front of a nation. The self-consciousness you feel about this is not part of the thing itself, and it did not come from God.

You have a hunger that God Himself opened in you, and He is not standing at a distance from it, wondering when you will grow out of it. The written word says He satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness, which is a sentence about His appetite for feeding, not about your appetite being excessive. The Holy Spirit is the One who keeps that promise operative in a cold chapel on a Thursday, in twenty minutes that you cannot account for afterward.

He does not intend to cure it

Here is the part nobody says, and it is the part that will actually help you.

This hunger is not going to be cured. Not tonight, not by a good week of prayer, not by a conference, not ever in the way you are quietly hoping. Somebody may have implied to you that if you got it right, the wanting would resolve and you would arrive at a settled state and be finished. That is not in the text and it is not what He is doing.

What He does with it is aim it.

There is a difference, and it is the whole difference. An unaimed hunger goes around the house at night opening doors. An aimed hunger has an address, and it goes there, and it is fed there, and then it is hungry again in the morning, and that is not a malfunction. It is what being alive next to an infinite God is like.

You were made with a capacity that God intends to keep filling rather than closing, and the filling is real food and not an idea about food. Matthew 5:6 says blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled, and it calls the hungry ones blessed while they are still hungry. The Holy Spirit is the One who does the filling, and He has never treated a returning appetite as evidence that the last meal failed.

So the twenty minutes in the back pew are not a symptom. They are the aimed hunger going to its address.

And I am not going to tell you to want less of Him, which is the only place in your life where more is simply more. This is yours tonight, and it is not a reward for having handled the wanting well: nearness now, in the room you are in, with the ache still open in the middle of it. James 4:8 says draw near to God and He will draw near to you, and the written promise puts the second half on Him. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes the nearness something you are in rather than something you are hoping for.