I Know The Exact Night

Most people carrying something like this are vague about it. She is not.

She could tell you the date. She could tell you it was a Thursday, and what the weather did, and the name of the person, and what song was playing in the other room, and that the whole thing took about two hours from the moment she decided.

She was nineteen. She is twenty-four now.

And the way she describes what happened afterwards is very precise, which is what makes it hard to talk her out of, because she is not being dramatic and she is not exaggerating and she is not looking for reassurance.

She says: something that had always been there was not there on the Friday.

Not a mood. She is careful about that. She had felt guilty about things before and knew what guilt was like, and this was not that. She says it was like a room in a house going out of use. Nothing looked different and she simply stopped being able to go in.

And she has lived five years on the other side of that Thursday as somebody who is technically a Christian in the way that a person is technically a member of a gym.

She goes sometimes. She believes all of it, factually, and she would defend it in an argument. She has never once, in five years, spoken to God about anything that mattered, because the whole framework in her head is that the line she crossed had a mechanism attached to it, and the mechanism fired, and He left, and that is simply the deal she signed up to without reading.

Nobody knows the date but her. She has never even written it down.

And that is you with your own Thursday, or you would not still be reading.

Paul makes a list, and he makes it on purpose

There is a passage everybody has heard at a wedding, and it was not written for a wedding. It was written by a man building a legal case, and the shape of it is the argument.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38-39

Look at what he is doing. He is not making a general statement. He is enumerating, going through the categories one at a time, the way somebody closes off every exit in a building.

Death. Life. Angels. Rulers. Things present. Things to come. Powers. Height. Depth.

And then, because he knows a person will find a category he did not name, he closes it: nor anything else in all creation.

Your Thursday is in creation. It happened inside it, at a time and a place, and it is covered by the last clause specifically because Paul knew somebody would be sitting there five years later certain that their particular thing was the exception.

You are not separated, and the night you have been carrying is inside the list Paul wrote to close every exit. It is written that nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:39). The Holy Spirit did not go out of a house on a Friday morning.

Now the mechanism you believe in, because it is the actual thing that has kept you out for five years.

You believe the line you crossed had an automatic consequence attached, and that it fired. That is a coherent system. It is just not this one. In this one, the thing that determines whether He stays was settled by Somebody else on a hill, and there is no clause anywhere in it that hands a nineteen-year-old the power to undo it in two hours on a Thursday.

You are not the one holding this together, and you were never strong enough to break it either. It is written that we were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance (Ephesians 1:13-14), and a guarantee is a thing another party gives and another party keeps. The Holy Spirit was in a nineteen-year-old on Thursday night and He was in her on Friday morning.

And here is the last of it, flat, and nothing follows it.

He never left. There is no room in the house that has gone out of use. The five years of not speaking to Him about anything that mattered were five years He was there for.

You are not cast off, and nothing has to happen first for that sentence to be true. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never is not suspended by a date. The Holy Spirit has been with you every day of the five years you have counted yourself out.