He Is Not Tired of You Yet

The light in a petrol station bathroom at half past five in the morning is the least forgiving light there is.

He is standing under it with both hands on the sink, and he has just done the thing again. Not a small slip either, the whole thing, the way he used to, the way he swore in February he had finished with. Eighty-one days. He knows the number to the day, because he had been counting the way you count when the counting is the only structure you have. And in about four minutes he has to go back out to the car, and drive home, and put the key in his own front door, and be a person.

What he is thinking about, in that light, is not the thing itself. It is God. He is doing the arithmetic that everyone in this situation does, and it goes like this: there has to be a number. Nobody says it out loud in church, but there has to be. Everyone knows a person can come back once, and probably three times, and possibly seven. But there is a point where you have simply used the account up, where the Father who was so glad the first time gets to the door and thinks, oh. Him again. And the awful conviction under the fluorescent tube is not I have failed. It is I have finally spent it.

So he does not pray. That is the part I would ask you to notice, because it is the real damage. He is not avoiding God because he loves the thing more than God. He is avoiding God because he cannot bear to watch a face he loves go tired at the sight of him.

You know this. Maybe your version has no petrol station in it. Maybe yours is a room in your own house, or a browser history, or a sentence you said to your child that your mother used to say to you, and the number you count is not days but something else. But you know exactly the moment I am describing, because you have stood in it, and you may be standing in it while you read this. You have not come back to God since. Not because you stopped believing. Because you are certain of what you would find on His face.

Nobody ever told you the number, because there is not one

Let me sit down here with you before anything else, because this floor is where you actually are and I am not going to hurry you off it.

The relapse is not the heaviest thing in your hands tonight. I want to be careful and exact about that. The heaviest thing is the shame that arrived with it, and shame is a different animal from guilt. Guilt says you did something wrong, and guilt can be answered. Shame says there is something wrong with you at the root, that the pattern is proof, that everyone who has ever quietly given up on you was reading the evidence correctly and only being polite about it. Shame does not send you back to God. Shame sends you into hiding, and then the hiding gets lonely, and the lonely sends you back to the thing, and that is the wheel, and it has turned under you long enough for its every part to be familiar.

And there is a specific loss inside a relapse that I do not think gets named enough, so let me name it. It is not only the days on the counter. It is the hope you had let yourself have. In February you believed it, genuinely, for a few weeks, and you started to make plans in a slightly different voice, and you told one person. That is what went. And now hoping again feels reckless, like walking back into a room where something fell on you last time, and the caution feels like wisdom, and it is actually the injury.

And the tiredness goes very deep. Not tired of trying. Tired of starting. There is a particular exhaustion that belongs to the person who has begun again eleven times, and it is not the same as laziness, and anyone who has confused the two in your hearing owed you an apology.

Now let me show you something in the Scriptures that changed the way I read the whole matter.

He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder.Psalm 107:14

That verse sits inside a psalm with a strange shape. Four separate groups of people are described in it, in trouble of four different kinds, and four separate times the same two lines come around like a refrain: they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and He brought them out. Four times. Same psalm. Same pattern of coming back.

Whoever wrote that was not embarrassed by the repetition. He built the song out of it. He wanted you to hear the same rescue happen again and again until the shape of it got into your body, because the shape is the message: the crying out is not weakened by having happened before, and the answer does not thin out with use.

And then hear the line that carries my own name in it, because I cannot say this to you often enough. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Thy faithfulness.

New every morning. Read that as a supply, and notice what kind of supply it is. It is not a lump sum you were issued at conversion and have been drawing down ever since, thinner each year, and it is not a limited edition. It is fresh mercy, poured out again, this morning, before you were awake, on the exact morning you are sure you disqualified yourself. He did not check yesterday's record before He issued it. It arrived while you were still asleep in the aftermath. Lamentations 3:22 was set down by a man watching a city burn, which is the only reason it can be trusted at half past five under a fluorescent tube, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that line the whole distance, off the page and onto the sink you have both hands on.

So the number does not exist. Nobody told you the number because there is not one, and the arithmetic you have been doing in that bathroom light is arithmetic about a God who does not exist, a smaller and more reasonable one that you built out of the faces of people who did eventually give up on you. He is not that. He is the One who runs, and He runs while the person is still a long way off and still rehearsing the apology.

Look at that story again with your own situation in your hands, because the detail everyone skips is the one you need. The son had a speech prepared. He had worked on it in a field, and it was a good speech, an honest one, and it ended with a request to be taken back as a hired man rather than a son, because he had done the same arithmetic you have been doing. He never finished it. The father was already down the road. The embrace happened before the confession, not after it, and that ordering is not sentimentality, it is doctrine. The welcome does not wait on the quality of your return.

And here is the second thing about that road, which nobody points out. The father saw him a long way off. You only see somebody a long way off if you have been looking down the road. He had been watching. Every day, presumably, including all the days that came to nothing. Luke 15:20 hands you the distance before it hands you the embrace, and His Spirit is what turns that verse from a story about somebody else's son into a road with your own front door at the end of it.