He Is Nigh the Broken Hearted

Before anything else, the true thing: it is still lit in you.

The proof is the withdrawing. A woman who no longer cared what God thinks would not need to go anywhere. She would stay exactly where she was and think about something else.

She is forty-three and the pattern is so old she has stopped seeing it as a pattern.

Something happens. It does not have to be large. She is short with her mother on the phone in a way that has a whole history in it, or she thinks something ugly about a friend and enjoys thinking it for a second, or she does the thing with the second bottle again.

And within about an hour, quietly and without announcing it to herself, she goes.

Not far. She still prays; she prays a kind of thin, formal thing that could be read out in a courtroom. She still goes on Sunday and sits in the same seat. But she has left the room and both of them know it, and she could not tell you exactly what she does differently, only that there is a distance and that she is the one who opened it.

If you asked her why, she would not have a ready answer. But underneath it, running since she was about nineteen, is a piece of arithmetic that has never been examined: He is going to pull back from this, and it is less painful if I go first.

The direction the psalm gives

There is a verse in the thirty-fourth psalm that states, plainly, which way God moves when a person's heart breaks.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh. Near. Close by. That is a statement about proximity, and it is triggered by exactly the condition you withdraw in.

Read what the verse takes as its cue. Not repentance completed. Not a matter resolved. A broken heart and a contrite spirit, which is to say: the state you are in about an hour after the phone call with your mother.

That is the moment Scripture says He comes near.

So the arithmetic you have run since nineteen is not slightly off. It is exactly inverted. In the hour you have always used to leave, He is closing the distance.

You have been getting up and walking out of a room God was walking into. That is not me putting a kind gloss on your pattern; Psalm 34:18 gives nearness as His response to a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it over a woman about an hour after a phone call.

Where the arithmetic came from

Now let me be gentle about where you learned it, because you did learn it, and not from God.

Somebody in your life withdrew when you were disappointing. That is how a person comes to have this reflex at nineteen; nobody invents it. There was somebody whose warmth moved with your performance, and you learned, correctly, that leaving first hurts less than being left.

That was a true piece of knowledge about a particular person and you have been applying it to God for twenty-four years.

You have been protecting yourself from a God who does not do the thing you are protecting yourself from. The written word says He draws near to the broken rather than away from them, and the Holy Spirit has never once withdrawn from a woman an hour after a bad phone call.

And I want to name the cost, because it is not just the distance. It is that you have never once let Him near you at your worst. Twenty-four years of being met by God only in your good hours, which means you have a relationship with Him that has never been tested in the place where it would actually count, and that is why it feels thin. Not because of what you have done. Because of what you have never let Him do.

You are not a woman He tolerates in the good hours, and there has never been a version of you He declines to come near. Scripture makes the broken heart the very cue for His nearness, and the Holy Spirit has been at that door on every occasion she has left the room first.