Turned Face Down Before Anyone Walks Past

The still life has been the same for three weeks because the tutor believes in that, and it is a brown jug, two lemons and a cloth, lit by an angled lamp that somebody knocks every single week.

Nine of them round it. Boards on knees, charcoal, and the particular concentrated quiet of a room where everybody is doing the same difficult thing at the same time and nobody is talking.

The tutor comes round. She is good. She says useful specific things, and she says them quietly to each person, and she has a habit of putting one finger near a part of the paper without touching it.

And every week, twice a week if it is a long evening, at the sound of the chair going back three places along, this woman turns her sheet face down on the board.

It is smooth. It is practiced. It looks like she is reaching for something. And as she does it she says a sentence to herself, silently, always the same one, and she has been saying it for so long that she does not experience it as a sentence any more. It is just the sound the movement makes.

The tutor has seen the drawing, incidentally. Twice, when she came round the other way. She said something warm and moved on and thought nothing of it.

If that turning motion is yours, sit down here at the end board with me. Today I am speaking to the one carrying a thing nobody knows, who took it to God properly and meant it, and who has a sentence that arrives every time anybody comes near her work.

God answering exactly that kind of sentence

There is a moment in Isaiah where a whole people say the thing you say, and God answers it directly, and the answer is one of the strangest and most physical sentences in the Bible.

They say: the Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me.

That is a sentence about themselves, said out of a hard stretch, and it has the same shape as yours. It is not a request. It is a settled conclusion, offered as description.

And God does not argue with the feeling and He does not scold them for having it.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:16

Graven. Cut in. Not written, not noted, not remembered fondly. Carved into, which is permanent by definition and which cannot be done to a hand without cost.

And He puts it on the palms. Not the back of the hand where a person might glance at it. The palms, which is where a worker's eye falls a thousand times a day, and where you cannot do anything at all without seeing it.

You are carved into the hands of God, and you were put there rather than asked to stay in mind. I am not offering you a tender image. The written word uses a cutting verb and names the palms specifically, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman with charcoal on her fingers.

He answers a conclusion with a fact

Here is what I want you to notice about the method, because the method is the mercy.

They said a thing about themselves. He did not say you should not feel that way. He did not produce reasons why the feeling was disproportionate. He did not tell them to be more grateful.

He put a fact next to it.

That is all. A fact about what He had already done, stated plainly, with no requirement attached and no instruction about how they were to receive it.

Which is why we are not going to argue with your sentence tonight either. Arguing has not worked in twenty years and it is not going to start working this Thursday. We are going to put a fact next to it, and then we are going to leave the two of them in the same room and let God do what He does.

You are held by a fact that does not require your agreement to be true, and you were never going to be argued into anything. Scripture answers a conclusion with an act rather than a rebuttal there, and it is His Spirit who makes a fact settle into a person who cannot yet feel it.