Four Floors Up at Tea Break

Half nine, and the whole job stops, and it does not matter what anybody is in the middle of.

Four floors up on the east side, which is the good side in the morning, and the boards are warm by now and there is a spot where two lifts meet that is wide enough to sit on properly. You can see the whole town from up there. The market, the two church towers, a train going along the back of it like something out of a model shop.

Three of them up there today. A flask, and somebody's mother's cake, which has become an institution and which the youngest lad has learned not to make jokes about. A conversation about a van.

He has been on the boards for twenty-two years and he has never lost the thing about the height. Some men do. He has not.

He used to pray up here.

Every morning at half nine for about eleven years, not out loud and nothing anybody would have noticed, and it was the best part of his day and he would have told you so.

It stopped about three years ago, and the reason is not that he stopped believing. It is that he started trying to cross something. There is a distance he became aware of, in a bad stretch, and he has been trying to close it ever since by effort, and it has not closed, and every failed crossing has made the distance look wider.

Sit down on the board with me. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a good while back, took it to God straight and meant every syllable, and has been trying to cross a distance ever since.

And before you brace for it: naming anything is not a condition of anything here, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not have it called one.

Read the verb, because it is passive

There is a sentence in Ephesians that does the whole of this in eleven words, and the grammar is the sermon.

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.Ephesians 2:13

Are made nigh.

That is passive. It is a thing done to somebody, not a thing done by somebody. Paul does not write you have come near, and he does not write you must come near. He writes that a nearness was produced in you by an agent, and then he names the agent, and the agent is not you.

And look at the tense at the front. But now. Not one day, not when the distance is finally closed. Now, in the sentence, at the time of writing, for people who were, in his own words, a long way off.

You are made near by the blood of Christ, and you were made near rather than asked to travel. I am not offering you a comforting grammar lesson. The written word puts the verb in the passive and names the agent explicitly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto a scaffold board at half nine.

The distance you have been crossing is not the distance that mattered

Now let me say something about the three years, and I want to say it with respect, because you have worked at this.

There are two distances a man can mean when he says he feels far from God.

One of them is a real gap in relationship, and Christ closed it, and Paul is describing the closing of exactly that one in the verse above, and it is finished and it does not reopen.

The other is a felt distance. It is real as an experience and it is not real as a location, and no amount of effort has ever closed it, because effort is not what it responds to and it was never a gap that needed crossing in the first place.

You have been putting the labor of the first distance into the second one for three years. That is not foolishness. Nobody told you there were two.

You are already as near to God as the blood of Christ can make a person, and you were never far off in the way the effort assumed. Scripture calls the crossing finished in that verse and leaves no distance for a man to close, and it is His Spirit, not a better run of mornings, who makes a settled nearness start to be felt.