As Far As East Is From West

It is still lit in you. That first, before anything else, because you will read this braced.

I know it is, because of what you do every time you pray. A man with nothing left does not begin nineteen years of prayers by dealing with God about the same thing. He stops praying, or he prays about the weather.

He is sixty-one and it is eleven months when he was thirty-eight and thirty-nine, and I am not going to describe it, and neither does he.

What I want to look at is not the eleven months. It is what happens at the start of every prayer since.

He sits down, or kneels, or is driving, and before anything else there is a piece of business. He goes back. He deals with it again. Not in detail every time, and it has worn smooth over the years into something almost liturgical, a form of words that acknowledges the thing and puts it before God and asks again.

Then he prays about whatever he actually sat down about.

Nineteen years. Every time. And if you asked him whether he believes he is forgiven he would say yes immediately, and he would be telling the truth about what he believes, and it would tell you nothing about what he does.

The distance in the psalm

There is a line in Psalm 103 that gives a distance, and the distance was chosen with care.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

He could have said north and south. He does not, and it matters. North and south are finite; there is a north pole, and past it you are going south again, and the distance can be measured and closed.

East and west have no such point. Travel east and you never begin traveling west. There is no meeting place, no far end, and the distance is not long, it is unbounded.

That is the measurement God chose for how far your transgressions have been taken from you.

And now put your eleven months against it. You go and fetch that thing at the start of every prayer. But if it has been removed as far as east is from west, then the retrieval you perform nineteen years running is not reaching anything, because there is nothing there to reach.

You have been going back to a place God emptied, and the emptying was measured on purpose. That is not me being generous with a psalm; Psalm 103:12 picks the one axis with no far end, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it beside a man doing his piece of business before he can start.

What the ritual has done

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to call your nineteen years hypocrisy or morbidity. It began as something decent.

At thirty-nine you did what a serious man does with a real wrong: you brought it. That was right. And then you brought it again, because you were not sure, and that was understandable. And then it became the way you begin, and a form of words grew round it, and now it is a rite.

But look at what the rite says every time you perform it. It says the matter is open. Not in words, in structure, because you would not deal with a settled thing at the top of every conversation.

So nineteen years of prayers have opened by treating as unsettled the one thing God went out of His way to describe as removed to an unbounded distance.

You have been reopening a case God closed with a measurement. The written word puts the removal at a distance with no far end, and the Holy Spirit does not carry a man back to fetch something He was sent to take away.

And the plain thing that this site says everywhere, because it applies here too. The flatness you have felt for years is not the eleven months surfacing. Dry feeling is not a punishment and it is not the wrong showing through. It is what nineteen years of beginning every prayer inside a courtroom does to a man's appetite for prayer.

You are not serving a sentence, and there has never been an outstanding item at the top of your file. Scripture says there is no condemnation for a person in Christ and puts no clause after it about a bad year, and the Holy Spirit has kept the coal in a man through the whole of it.