The gate at the bottom of the yard bangs when it is loose and it does not bang when it is latched, and after enough years a man does not hear it as a sound anymore, he hears it as information.
It banged at two in the morning on a night in March.
I was awake before I was awake, which is a thing that happens to farmers and to parents and to nurses and to nobody else. I was standing on the floor with one boot in my hand before I had formed a sentence about it in my head.
I want to be accurate about this, because it is the whole point of the story. There was no decision. I did not lie there and weigh whether it was worth it. There was a bang and then there was a man with a boot, and between those two things there was nothing at all.
Bucky was at the top of the lane. He was not doing anything and he was not going anywhere, he was just standing in the dark at the top of a lane the way he does, and it took twenty minutes and I was back in the house by twenty five past.
The thing that has stayed with me is not the going out.
It is that at about ten past two, walking up that lane with a flashlight, I thought a thought that I have not been able to put down since. I thought: nobody would do this for me.
I am fifty. I have a boy asleep in that house and a farm my great grandfather stood on and about four hundred people who would say something kind about me at a funeral. And I walked up a lane at ten past two in the morning and thought that sentence with my whole chest, and I did not know I had it in me until it was out.
I have never said that to anybody. I am saying it now because I have a feeling it is not just me.
The two words He uses about it
Jeremiah is written to a people in the worst chapter of their history and the sentence in the middle of it is one of the shortest and largest in the book.
The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. (Jeremiah 31:3)
Two words are doing the work. Everlasting, which is about duration and has no start in it, and lovingkindness, which is the old word for a settled covenant loyalty rather than a warm feeling.
And the connector between them is therefore. The drawing is the consequence of the love rather than the cause of it. He is not drawn toward people because they turned out well, He draws them because of a thing that was already the case.
You are being drawn by somebody whose reason for it was settled before you were anywhere near it. Jeremiah 31:3 puts everlasting first and the drawing second, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that order land in a man who has just found out what he thinks about himself.
There is a thought that arrives in the middle of the night in people who are the ones everybody relies on, and it is not self pity and it does not have any drama in it. It is a flat conclusion, arrived at wearily, that the arrangement runs one way.
You have not been in a one way arrangement, however the arithmetic looked at two in the morning. The written word says the drawing follows the loving, and His Spirit is what makes an old sentence intercept a flat conclusion.
Who does the going in the middle of the night
There is a psalm that says something about God and sleep that farmers and parents ought to be told earlier than they usually are.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. (Psalm 121:4)
That verse is not about God being tireless in the abstract. It is in a psalm about a road, and about somebody looking up at hills and wondering where help comes from, and the answer given is about somebody being awake.
Which means that at two in the morning, walking up a lane, a man is not the only one up.
You are not the only one awake in the house tonight. Psalm 121:4 makes the wakefulness a property of God rather than a virtue of the person walking, and the Spirit of God is what makes that read as company instead of as a rebuke.
And the psalm keeps going and gets more domestic rather than less: The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in. Going out and coming in. That is not a metaphor about life's journey. That is a door.
You have been watched over at the door, both directions, on every one of those nights. Psalm 121:8 says going out and coming in in the plainest words available, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves plain words into an actual yard at twenty five past two.
So here is what I would say, having thought a thing in a lane that I did not enjoy finding out I thought.
You are not in a one way arrangement, and Jeremiah 31:3 puts a therefore between the loving and the drawing so nobody can get the order wrong. The Holy Spirit is what keeps that from being a fine idea and makes it the answer to a sentence a man thinks at ten past two.
The reflex is the evidence. That is the thing I have worked out since. I did not decide to go out for that goat, and the not deciding is what tells you what is actually underneath. And if a reflex like that can be in a tired man with one boot on, then what it is a small copy of is not a decision either.
You have been gone after by somebody for whom it was never a weighing up. Psalm 121:4 says He neither slumbers nor sleeps, and His Spirit is what makes that a fact about tonight rather than a fact about theology.
And this is for whoever else is reading it out at the end of a long day, who has had that thought in a lane or a hallway or a car and has never said it out loud to a soul. You were never the only one awake, and the drawing has been going on since before you could have earned any of it. Jeremiah 31:3 says everlasting, which has no start in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a word that big fit into one man's night.
Declare this over yourself
Say it out loud. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak over what you conclude about yourself at two in the morning is genuinely yours, delegated and never invented. God says the loving came first and the drawing followed, so speak to the conclusion: you have standing to address it because He is the one who set the order. An ambassador carries the King's word and never his own policy, so say what God has said and leave the outcome to Him. Every line below is Jeremiah 31:3 and Psalm 121:4 handed back in your own voice, and it is His Spirit, not your volume, that makes saying it a receiving.
- Doubt that anybody would get up for me, you are not the arrangement here. The Word of God says I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee, and the therefore settles which came first.
- Flat conclusion I reached in the dark, you are finished in the name of Jesus. I am kept and I am accompanied, because Psalm 121:4 says He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
- Father, You have never once had to decide whether I was worth getting up for. I receive that today, and I thank You that Your word calls it everlasting, which is a word with no beginning in it at all.
Jeremiah 31:3
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