He Goes Before You Into the Cold

The word she uses in her own head is out.

Not lost. Not backslidden. She would resist both of those and she would be right to. She goes. She serves on the rota. She would tell anybody who asked that Jesus is Lord and mean it in her bones.

But somewhere in the last four years she has come to feel that she is out. Off the edge of something. That the verses people put on cards are written for a certain kind of person in a certain kind of country, and she has walked, without meaning to and without noticing when, into terrain that those sentences were not drafted to cover.

She is fifty-two. What happened was not one thing. It was her brother, and then it was the two years of the appeal, and then it was the way certain people behaved during the two years of the appeal, and then it was her own mother saying something in a hospital car park that she has not been able to put down.

None of it made her doubt God. That is the part nobody understands when she has tried, twice, to explain it.

It made her feel geographically separated from Him. As though the whole warm world of God-and-His-people were somewhere behind her now, and she had gone on ahead into a country where none of the promises had been surveyed, and she would have to manage.

Whose job the going ahead is

Moses says something to a whole nation on the edge of country none of them had ever seen, and the grammar of it is the answer to your word out.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee.Deuteronomy 31:8

He it is that doth go before thee.

Not He will meet you there. Not He will come if you call. He goes first. Arriving somewhere and finding God already in it is the ordinary arrangement, and it is stated as His own work, in His own job description, before anybody has set foot in the place.

Which does something to the word out. There is no country you can walk into that He has not been in first, because going first is the thing He does. Not as a comfort. As a job.

You have not arrived anywhere ahead of God, and there is no terrain that He reaches only after you do. That is not me reassuring you past your own experience; Deuteronomy 31:8 puts the going before on His side as His own work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken on a border and lays it over a woman who has felt out for four years.

Where the feeling came from and what it is not

Now let me be careful with the four years, because I am not going to tidy them and I am not going to explain them.

I will not tell you what the appeal was for. I will not tell you why people behaved the way they did or what your mother meant in that car park, and anyone who offers you a tidy account of any of it is guessing at your expense.

What I will say is what the feeling of being out is and is not.

It is a real feeling and it is describing something true: you have been somewhere most of the people around you have not been, and that is genuinely isolating, and the cards on the wall do read thin from where you are standing. That part is accurate.

What is not accurate is the conclusion. Being somewhere other people have not been is not the same as being somewhere God has not been, and you have quietly let the first fact stand in for the second for four years.

You are isolated from people who have not been where you have been, and you have never once been isolated from God. The written word says He will not fail nor forsake, with no clause naming a terrain where that expires, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been the seal on that through the whole of it, including the car park.

And I want to name one more thing plainly. Dry feeling and this particular kind of loneliness are not sin and they are not distance. Nobody is going to require you to explain them or repent of them. What you have described is what happens to a person who has carried something heavy in a place where nobody could follow.

You are being kept in a country you believe is unsurveyed, and He mapped it before you got there. Scripture puts His going ahead before anybody's arrival, and the Holy Spirit has been holding that true across four years of a woman feeling out.