Nothing on That List Is Temperature

He can say it from memory, and he has, at two funerals and one hospital bedside, and he meant it every time about them.

Neither death, nor life. Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers. Nor things present, nor things to come. Nor height, nor depth.

He is sixty-one. He has kept the same three verses in the front of the same Bible for thirty-four years. He drives people to appointments. He has never in his life had a dramatic season and would tell you so cheerfully.

What he has had, for the last four years, is nothing.

Not doubt. He wants that understood, and he has said it out loud exactly once, to a man he used to work with, and the man did not know what to do with it so he has not said it since. He does not doubt any of it. He would go to the wall for the whole of it tomorrow.

He just cannot feel a thing, and has not been able to for four years, and has kept getting up and doing all of it anyway.

And here is the private arithmetic, the one that runs at about four in the morning. He goes down the list. Death, life, angels, powers, height, depth. And he cannot find himself on it.

None of those is what is wrong with him. So he has come to a conclusion that he would immediately correct in anybody else, and cannot correct in himself: the list is real, and my thing is not on it, so my thing may be the one that does it.

Read the end of the list

Let me put the whole thing in front of you, because I think you have been reading the items and skipping the closing clause, which is where Paul actually shuts the door.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38-39

Nor any other creature. That is not a throwaway. That is Paul, having named the biggest categories he can think of, deliberately closing off the possibility that somebody in a bad year would go down the list looking for a gap.

He knew you would do this. Somebody was always going to read that list and think, but my thing is not there. So he ended it with a clause that covers everything made, which includes you, and which therefore includes anything about you, and which therefore includes four years of feeling nothing.

You are covered by the clause that was written for exactly the man who cannot find himself on the list. That is not me stretching a text to be kind to you; Romans 8:39 closes with a category that leaves nothing out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a first-century sentence and stands it up beside a man doing arithmetic at four in the morning.

What the list is actually about

Now here is the piece that I think will land, and it is about what kind of list it is.

Look at the items. Death. Angels. Principalities. Powers. Height and depth. Every one of them is an outside force. Paul is naming powers that might come at a person from beyond themselves and rip them away.

Your numbness is not on the list because it is not that kind of thing. It is not an assailant. It is a condition of the man himself, and Paul is not writing about conditions of the man, because the love he is describing does not run on the man in the first place.

Read the last five words again. In Christ Jesus our Lord. The love is located there. Not in your chest. Not in your response. It is held somewhere outside your own weather, which is exactly why weather cannot reach it.

You have been looking for your condition on a list of external powers, and your condition was never the sort of thing that could appear there. The written word puts that love in Christ rather than in the believer's feeling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it there through four years a man could not feel a thing.

And let me say plainly what four years of getting up anyway actually is. It is not the profile of a man being separated from anything. A man drifting away from God does not drive people to appointments for four years while feeling nothing. He stops. That is what drifting looks like. What you have been doing has a different name, and the name is faithfulness, and it is expensive, and God has watched every week of it.

You were never in the process of being separated, and there has been no proceeding to be frightened of. Scripture says nothing in all creation can do it and then closes the category on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that in a man who feels the seal exactly as much as he feels anything else, which is not at all.