Written Somewhere I Cannot Reach

It was the last morning of the retreat and the mist had not lifted off the water yet, and she had walked down to the jetty on her own with her boots unlaced because she had not expected to go outside.

Three days of quiet had done to her what three days of quiet does. She had seen, clearly, in a way she had not been able to see it in eleven years of working the way she works, that the thing she serves is not God. She serves the work. The work sets her alarm and decides her mood and tells her what she is worth on any given Thursday, and she had known it for years the way you know something you have agreed not to look at.

And standing on that jetty she said to God, out loud, with nobody within a hundred yards:

Never again. I am not giving it that place again. I mean it.

That was two years ago. She is giving it that place again. She has been giving it that place again since about the third week of that same month.

And what makes this one different from the promises people usually confess is that there is nothing to point at. Nobody was hurt. No calls went unmade, no gate went unstood at, no door stayed shut. The promise was about the inside of her, and she broke it on the inside of her, where she cannot get at it to fix it.

That is the specific despair of an interior promise. If it had been about Sundays she could have gone on a Sunday. What do you do about a thing that lives in the place you cannot reach?

You may have made one of those. About your temper, or your appetite for a certain kind of attention, or what you do with your evenings inside your own head. And you may have concluded that a person who cannot reach the thing they promised about has nothing to bring, and so has quietly stopped bringing anything.

Who does the writing

Let me take you to the passage where God addresses this exact problem, and notice that it is God who raises it, not us.

The people He is speaking to had a covenant written on stone and had comprehensively failed to keep it, and the diagnosis was not that the stone was faulty. The diagnosis was location. It was written outside of them.

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.Jeremiah 31:33

You are being written on in the one place you have never been able to get your hands into. Jeremiah 31:33 makes both the putting and the writing His own verbs, and the Holy Spirit is the one whose hand is doing it, which is the whole point and not a decoration.

The inward parts

Read who the acting party is in that sentence, because it is not subtle once you look.

I will put. I will write. Both verbs are His. The location is your inward parts and your heart, and the hand doing the writing is not yours.

Which means the place you cannot reach is not a place He cannot reach. It is, in fact, exactly the place He specified. He did not promise to hand you better instructions for a surface you could work on. He promised to write inside the surface you cannot get to.

You are being written on in the one place you have never been able to get your hands into. Jeremiah 31:33 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the writing, which is the whole point and not a decoration on it.

Now the honest half, because this category holds its terms and does not hide them.

There are things in this for you. To come. To turn. To be honest about what has your Thursdays. To not lie about it, which you have not been doing, and I want you to notice that: two years of knowing exactly what is true about yourself is not nothing, and a woman who is lying to herself does not stand on a jetty and say never again.

But the mending of the inside was never assigned to you. That is the difference between a covenant on stone and a covenant in the heart, and it is the reason God changed the location in the first place.

You have been trying to do the one job in this covenant that was explicitly taken out of your hands. Scripture is exact about who puts and who writes, and the Spirit of God has been at that work in you through the whole two years you have been calling a failure.

Not a slower version of the same thing

I want to guard this so it does not get soft.

This is not: relax, it will happen. That is a wish, and wishes have never changed anybody's Thursday.

It is that there is a real and specific work going on in a real and specific place, done by a real Person, and your part is to stop standing outside your own chest with a pen, trying to do the engraving from the wrong side of the wall.

You are held inside a covenant whose interior work has an owner, and the owner is not you. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is the plain sense of I will put and I will write, and His Spirit has not stopped doing it once in two years, including in the third week of that same month.

And there is a second half to the verse that people leave off, and it is the warmest part. And will be their God, and they shall be my people. The writing is not the goal. The belonging is. He gets inside the place you cannot reach because that is where a person actually lives, and He wants you, and not your compliance.