The waiting area is three chairs, a low table with two magazines from a year that is not this one, a vending machine that has been out of the second row since anybody can remember, and a radio on a shelf that nobody has ever adjusted.
Through the glass you can see the workshop, which is the whole point of sitting in there. Your car goes up on the ramp and you can watch a man walk underneath it with a light, and there is something about that which every person who has ever waited in one of those rooms has felt and nobody says out loud.
An hour, he was told. It will be an hour and ten.
He is fifty-four. He has a coffee out of the machine that he did not want and is drinking anyway.
And he has not prayed for about four years, and the reason is precise, and it is the sort of reason a precise man gets stuck on.
He cannot find the beginning.
He can tell you when he came to faith, and that is not what he means. He means the beginning of God's regard for him personally. And he has looked for it, because he is a man who wants to understand a mechanism, and if you can find where a thing started you can usually work out what started it, and if he could work out what started it he would know whether it is still running.
And because he cannot find the start, he has concluded there must have been a condition somewhere that he has lost sight of, and that the whole arrangement may therefore have lapsed without notice.
Sit down on the third chair with me. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a long way back, took it to God straight and meant every syllable, and has been trying to find the start of the thing so he can check whether it is still in force.
And before you brace: naming anything is not a condition here, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not once say otherwise.
A word that means out of sight in both directions
There is a sentence in Jeremiah that answers a man looking for a beginning, and it answers him with a word rather than a date.
Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3
The word behind everlasting is olam, and it is worth knowing what it actually pictures, because the English is thinner than the Hebrew.
Olam is a horizon word. Its root sense is of something concealed or out of sight, and it means a duration that runs away past the point where a person can see it, in either direction. Not merely long. Beyond the vanishing point.
So the answer to a man who cannot find the beginning is that there is not one to find inside anything he can see. The love runs back past the edge of the visible, and past his history, and past the thing he keeps checking against.
Which means the search you have been conducting was never going to produce a result, and the absence of a result was never evidence.
You are loved with a love that runs past the horizon in both directions, and you were never going to find a start to it inside your own record. I am not being generous with the vocabulary. The written word chooses a horizon word rather than a long one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man watching a light move under a car.
Therefore, which settles the order
Now the second clause, and the small word joining them, which is the load bearing part of the sentence.
Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.
Therefore. The drawing is the consequence of the love. Not its cause, not its condition, and not its trigger. God does not say: I drew you, and therefore I love you. He says the love was there, running back out of sight, and the drawing followed from it.
Which puts your search the wrong way round. You have been looking for the event that started the regard. The verse says the regard started nothing; it is the thing everything else started from.
And the word for drawn is the one used for hauling on a rope, a continuous pull rather than a single tug. It is not describing a moment four years ago that may have expired. It describes something still under tension.
You are being drawn on a line that is still under tension, and you were being drawn through every one of the four years you were checking. Scripture puts the therefore between the love and the drawing and puts the love first, and it is His Spirit, not a located beginning, who lets a precise man rest inside something he cannot date.
So here is the ask, and it is one sentence long.
Pray one sentence today. Out loud. About anything at all.
The radio nobody has ever adjusted. The second row of the vending machine. The man with the light under the car, and how good he plainly is at his job.
And do not mention the thing in it. Not as avoidance and not as a technique. Because the beginning you have been looking for is not inside anything you can see, and the arrangement has not lapsed.
There is no second stage. If you never put that matter into words with God again, He has held every part of it since before it happened, and nearness has never once depended on a man locating a start date.
And one plain thing first, because a page is not always the help a man needs. If what sits under this has gone past a heavy stretch into hours when being here at all feels like too much, tell one living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line: 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or whatever the number is where you live. You never have to say the thing itself in order to ask for help staying.
You are loved with an everlasting love and drawn on a line still under tension, and both of those were running through all four years. That is what the written word settles in Jeremiah 31, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it off a page and into a room with three chairs and a magazine from last year.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that is the ground under every word coming next. This is not a mood being worked up. It is agreement out loud with a love that has no visible beginning, and how this morning goes, and how the year goes, the outcome is His. The written word is what settled it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it.
- Ramp with my car up on it, you are two posts and an hour of my morning. You are honest work being done properly and you were never a place to audit anything. The written word calls His love everlasting, and I am talking again on the drive out of here.
- Search for the beginning of it, you were never going to produce a result and I read that as a finding, and I close you in the name of Jesus. Olam runs past the edge of what a man can see. There is no start date inside my record to find.
- Lord, You loved first and the drawing followed, and the therefore in that sentence settles the order of it. I am saying one ordinary thing out loud before I pull off the forecourt. And the line has been under tension through all four of the years I spent checking.
Jeremiah 31:3
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