He Binds Up What Was Broken

It is still burning in you. That first.

The proof is that you keep coming. A woman who had given up would not go to the trouble of mending herself in order to arrive; she would simply stop arriving.

She is forty-six and the process takes about two days.

Something goes wrong. And she does not come to God with it, not immediately, and not because she is angry or avoiding Him. She goes away and works on it.

She thinks it through until she can see her own part in it clearly. She forgives whoever needs forgiving, actually and properly. She works out what she has learned. She gets to the place where she can describe the whole thing in a level voice with the right proportions and no self-pity in it.

And then she comes.

And what arrives in front of God is a finished piece of work. Assessed, understood, digested, and presentable. She has never once handed Him anything while it was still in pieces, and she would tell you, if you put it to her, that this is respect.

She has been a Christian for twenty-two years and God has met the mended version of every single thing that has happened to her.

Read the verbs and what they assume

God describes His own work as a shepherd in Ezekiel, and every verb in the list assumes a particular condition in the thing being handled.

I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.Ezekiel 34:16

Seek that which was lost. That verb needs something still missing.

Bring again that which was driven away. That needs something still out.

Bind up that which was broken. That needs something still broken. You cannot bind a limb that has been set.

Strengthen that which was sick. That needs something still weak.

Every single item on that list is a work God does on a thing in its unrepaired state, which means that everything you have handed Him for twenty-two years has arrived in a condition none of those verbs can act on.

You have been bringing Him finished work and He describes Himself entirely in terms of unfinished. That is not me finding a clever angle; Ezekiel 34:16 lists four verbs and every one of them requires damage still present, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a shepherd's job description and lays it beside a woman's two-day process.

What the mending is actually for

Now let me be careful, because your instinct is not contemptible and I am not going to sneer at it.

Wanting to come with something clear rather than a mess is not vanity. Some of it is genuinely consideration, and some of it is the habit of a competent woman who has spent her life sorting things out for other people and has never learned another posture.

But look at what it costs. The two days are the days you need Him. By the time you arrive you are past it. You bring Him a report of a crisis rather than a crisis, and you have gone through the actual thing alone, every time, for twenty-two years.

And the reason it has never been challenged is that it looks exactly like maturity from the outside. Nobody at your church would identify a problem here. They would call you steady.

You have been going through the worst of everything on your own and calling it respect. The written word makes God the binder of things still broken, and the Holy Spirit is not a supervisor to whom finished work is submitted.

And I want to say the plain thing this site says everywhere, because it belongs here too. The dryness you have felt for a long time is not the punishment for anything. But it is not a mystery either, and I will risk saying what I think it is: a person cannot feel close to somebody they only ever meet after the event. Twenty-two years of arriving afterward is not a sin. It is just a long time to have been alone in the first two days.

You are not being kept at a distance, and no arrangement was ever made requiring you to arrive presentable. Scripture puts God's own hands on the still-broken thing, and the Holy Spirit has been present through every two-day repair a woman has done in private.