To Whom Shall I Go

He did not cry at the graveside and he has thought about that more than he has thought about the grief.

His father was eighty one and a good man and the whole town came, and there were four hours of people in the house afterward with more food than anybody could eat, which is how it is done. And at some point in the afternoon he went out to the yard on his own and said to God that he would carry what his father carried. That he would keep it. Those were the words: I will keep it.

That was six years ago and he has kept almost none of it, and that is not the article.

The article is what happens now when he prays, which is nothing.

He does pray. That is the thing people would not guess about him. He gets up, he does what his father did, more or less, and he says the words, and it is like posting a letter into a wall. There is no distress in it. There is no sweetness in it. There is no anything, and there has not been for a long time, and if he is honest there was not a great deal even before.

And here is the conclusion he has come to, and he holds it with a certain grim respect for himself: a man who feels nothing while he prays is pretending. Whatever else you say about it, that is a performance. And he was raised by a man who despised a performance, and so he has begun to stop.

He is not going to keep saying words into a wall and calling it faith. He would rather be honest about having nothing than dress up an empty room.

You may have made that same judgment about yourself. You may have decided that what you have is not faith because there is no warmth in it, and that the honest course is to stop.

The flattest sentence in the gospels

Now let me take you to a scene, and I want you to notice what is not in it.

Jesus has said something enormous and difficult and a large crowd has just walked away. John records it plainly: from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. It is a mass departure and the atmosphere in that place must have been terrible.

And Jesus turns to the twelve and asks them, will ye also go away.

Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.John 6:68-69

You are able to stay on a sentence with no warmth in it, and Scripture records exactly that as the answer of the one who stayed. John 6:68 keeps Peter's flat reasoning in the record without apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that man in the room.

Look at the shape of the answer

There is no ecstasy in that sentence anywhere.

He does not say: because my heart burns. He does not say: because of what I felt on the water. He says, in effect, where else is there. It is a question, and it is almost a shrug, and it is one of the most load bearing sentences in the New Testament.

To whom shall we go. That is a man taking stock. It is the reasoning of somebody who has looked at the alternatives and found them worse. It is flat, and it is dry, and it is the answer that keeps him in the room while a crowd walks out of it.

You are able to stay on a sentence with no warmth in it, and Scripture records exactly that as the answer of the one who stayed. John 6:68 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a bad afternoon in Capernaum and stands it in a yard six years later.

Now I want to speak to the thing about performance, because that is your father's word and it deserves respect.

He was right about performance. A man who works himself up in front of others so they will think something of him is doing exactly what your father despised, and there is a great deal of it about.

But that is not what you are doing. You are getting up alone, in a house with nobody watching, and saying words into a room where you feel nothing, and receiving no reward for it of any kind. There is no audience. There is no benefit. There is not even a good feeling at the end.

That is the exact opposite of a performance. A performance is done for an effect, and you are getting no effect at all, and you have kept doing it for six years.

You have been doing the least performative thing available to a human being and calling it a lie. Scripture keeps Peter's flat answer in the record without apology, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept a man in that yard doing something that pays him nothing.

What the emptiness is not

And I am going to be careful here, because this category has a rule and the rule exists to protect you.

I am not going to tell you the feeling comes back. I do not know that, nobody honest does, and to schedule it for you would be to hand you a new thing to wait for, and you have waited enough. It may come. It may not come in the form you would recognize. That is God's and not mine.

What I will say is that the emptiness is not a report on your standing. It is not evidence about whether He hears you, and it is not evidence about whether you are His, and it is certainly not evidence that you are a fraud.

You are heard at this temperature, and the temperature was never the transmission. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the plain sense of a man saying to whom shall we go and being counted among those who stayed, and His Spirit is the one carrying words out of a room where nothing at all is happening.