I Went All That Way And Came Home The Same

Four hundred miles, two nights in a hotel she could not really afford, and a week of leave she had been saving since January.

She is not naive. She did not go expecting fireworks and she would be embarrassed if you thought she had. She went because she was thirsty, and because everything she had heard about that place suggested that thirsty people did well there, and because she has been dry for about three years and had run out of things to try at home.

She sat through everything. She went to the early ones. She did not sneak off at lunchtime. On the second evening she went forward, which she does not normally do, and a kind woman prayed for her for a long time and said some things that were true and general.

And she got back on the train on the Sunday and came home.

And here is what she has never said to anybody, including her husband, who asked how it went and got told that it was really good.

I have now spent four hundred miles and eleven hundred pounds proving that the problem is me.

That is not the sentence she says out loud. What she says out loud is that it was really good, and she means about sixty per cent of that, and the other forty per cent has gone into a box that gets heavier every time she goes anywhere.

So let me ask you.

Where did you go, and what did you come home with?

The question stayed in the book unanswered

There is a psalm that everybody knows the first line of and almost nobody reads to the end.

The deer panting for the water. That one.

And two verses in, the psalmist asks a question which is, if you look at it properly, exactly your question.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?Psalm 42:2

Notice that the question never gets answered anywhere in the psalm. You are allowed to be thirsty and to say so out loud, and the Holy Spirit never once treated a soul that goes looking as a soul that has done something wrong.

When can I go.

He is not asking a theological question about the omnipresence of the Almighty. He knows the answer to that one. He is a man who has been to a place where God met him, and he is somewhere else now, and he wants to go back, and he says so.

He remembers the crowd. He says so a verse later. How he used to go with the multitude, leading the procession, with shouts of joy.

That is a man who has been to the conference, and remembers the conference, and cannot get back to it.

Now, watch what God does with that question, because this is the part that will hold you.

He keeps it. He does not answer it. There is no verse further down where God explains, or where the psalmist arrives somewhere, or where the thirst is resolved. The psalm ends with the man still talking to his own soul and telling it to hope.

And that unanswered question is in the songbook, and it has been sung by the people of God for three thousand years, which means the whole community has always understood that a thirsty person who cannot get to water is not a defective person.

Hear where you stand, and hear it as strongly as I can say it.

You are not the problem that the journey proved. Scripture keeps when can I go and meet with God in the book without answering it, and the Holy Spirit never once made the receiving depend on how far somebody was willing to travel.

And I want to say something about the four hundred miles, because I think you are carrying them wrongly.

You went because you were thirsty. That is what the psalm calls the good thing. Not the arrival. The thirst, and what a thirsty soul does about it, which is to get up and go and look.

Nowhere in that psalm is the man criticized for wanting to go. Nowhere is he told that a truly mature person would not have needed a place. His going is treated as the natural motion of a living soul, and the word puts it in the mouth of a deer, which does not deliberate about whether it is spiritually appropriate to be thirsty.

The journey was not a test you failed. It was thirst behaving exactly the way thirst behaves.