Bless The Name, Part Three: The Rope Came Down
You have to understand what I had decided, or the next thing will look small to you, and it was not small. It is the hinge my whole life turns on.
I had decided that it was finished. That God had agreed it was finished. And that the one kind thing left was to stop pretending otherwise. A man who has decided that does not reach out for help. That is the entire point of the decision. It is a door pulled shut from the inside, and then the handle taken off the inside too, so that even if he changed his mind there would be nothing left to take hold of.
So I did not reach. I want that to be very clear to you, because out of everything I have told you it is the most important, and it is the exact thing that broke the lie in half. I did not climb out. I could not, and I would not, and I had stopped believing there was any out to climb toward.
Somebody else came down.
There was a knock at the door. It was the priest. The one who used to sit beside me in the pew and say almost nothing at all. I had not been to Mass in longer than I could count. I had not answered a single one of his calls. I had told him, in every way a man can tell another man without ever using the words, to leave me to it. And here he was on my step on an ordinary evening with no occasion to explain it, and when I dragged the door open, filthy and ashamed and reeking of what I was, he did not flinch and he did not lecture and he did not try to explain one single thing.
He said, can I come in. And he came in, and he sat himself down at that same kitchen table, in the middle of the wreck of me, and he stayed.
I need you to see what that did, because the enemy had built the entire pit on the one lie, that I was written off, that God had looked at me and turned His face away for good, and that any reaching back on my part would only be an insult to a verdict already passed. And here, sitting at my table in the ruin of my kitchen and plainly not leaving, was a man who had crossed the whole city to be there. Who knew exactly what I was, and had come anyway. He did not argue against the lie. He did the one thing the lie could not survive. He sat down inside it. He put his own body in the chair across from mine, as if to say, with no words at all, that whatever I had decided about myself, Someone had decided otherwise, and had sent a man a long way through the dark to say so simply by being there.
That is how grace came for me in the end. Not as an answer. I told you at the very start, He never did answer the charge, not that night and not for years after it, not in the way I had stood in the wreckage and demanded. He did something better than answer it. He came, and He sat down at the table with the man who had filed it.
And do you remember the verse I hated. I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. I had only ever heard it as a sentence passed on me, a locked door, the dead who are not permitted to come back. I had it exactly backwards, and that was the night I first began to turn it over in my hands and see the other face of it. They could not come back to me. Which meant the whole weight of the coming had fallen onto the other side of it. If there was ever going to be a road again between me and everything I had lost, I was never going to be the one strong enough to walk it. It was going to have to be walked from the far end. Toward me. Down into the dark. All the way to the table where I sat.
And it had just that moment knocked on my door.
I did not fix myself that night. Let me be honest with you, there was no lightning, and the climb still ahead of me was long and ugly, and I fell more than once in the years that came. But something turned. The handle went back onto the inside of the door. And for the first time in longer than I can tell you, I did the one thing the whole long descent had been engineered to make forever impossible.
From the very bottom, with nothing left in my hands and deserving none of it, I reached.
I wish I could tell you that the reaching fixed everything at once. That is not how it went, and I will not lie to you to make God look like a magician, because He is not one, and the men who sell Him to you as one are only setting you up to lose your faith the first time He declines to perform.
The climb was long. It was longer than the fall and uglier in its own way, because a fall a man can do in his sleep and a climb he has to do awake. I got sober and then I did not. I went back to that cupboard more times than I care to count, after the priest, after I knew better, and every single time I was certain that this was the proof that the whole thing had been a sentimental lie and that the enemy had been right about me from the start.
But one thing had changed, and it was the only thing that needed to. Before, when I fell, I fell away and I stayed down. Now, when I fell, I could not stay. Something reached back up out of me toward the door before I had even decided to, the way your hand comes off a hot stove before you feel the burn. I went back to that priest and to another man in a black robe behind a screen, and I said out loud the things I had been drinking so as not to say, and every time, with no exception I can call to mind in all those years, I walked out of that little box lighter than I walked into it, though nothing about my circumstances had changed at all. The grace was the same grace it had always been. It had never thinned. The only difference in the whole world was that I had begun reaching for it again and reaching and reaching, until the reaching wore a groove in me as deep as the other thing had worn, and one morning I understood that I had a new habit, and the new habit was Him.
There is a prophet, a strange and heartbroken one, named Hosea, and God did a hard thing to him to make a point with it. He told him to marry a woman He knew would betray him, and she did, and she left, and she went so far down that in the end she was sold, standing in a market to be bought like a sack of grain. And do you know what God told him to do. He told Hosea to go down to that market and find his own wife on the block and buy her back. With his own money. In front of everyone. And bring her home and love her as though she had never gone.
It took me years to understand that I was her. Sit with how much that costs to say. I was not the faithful prophet in that story. I was the one who had been sold. I had walked down into the market myself and put a price on my own head and stood there in the dark waiting for it to be paid or to be over. And He came down into the market. And He did not haggle. He did not ask what I was worth, because He was never buying me for what I was worth, He was buying me because I was His. And He paid, and He brought me home.
And there is a place in that same prophet I still cannot read all the way through. God had given Hosea's children names, terrible names, to sharpen the point. He named one of them Not-Pitied. He named another Not-My-People. Those were the very names I had signed over myself in the dark, you understand. The enemy had me writing them at the bottom of every night. Not pitied. Not His. And then, further on in the book, God takes those same names up in His own hand and He crosses them out, and under Not-Pitied He writes Pitied, and under Not-My-People He writes, You are My people. He does not argue with the old names. He does not explain them away. He simply writes the true ones over the top of the lies, in His own hand. And that is the whole of what was done to me.
I told you at the very start of all this that I had a wife, and that I would tell you her name later, if I was able.
I am able. It took me the whole story to be able. But I am able.
Her name was Ruth.
There. Ten years, and it still takes something out of the middle of me to say it out loud in a room, but I can say it now, and there was a long time when I could not say it at all, and the entire distance between those two men is everything I have told you tonight.
She was named for a woman in the Lord's own family, far back along the line that runs down to Bethlehem. And that first Ruth, her story is about a man who buys back what his family had lost and takes the widow home and will not leave her alone in the world. I lived beside that name for years and never once stopped to think what it meant. I think of it now every day of my life.
So that is how I became the man you sat down beside today.
I still miss them the way you would miss your own breathing. Do not ever let anyone tell you that grace takes the missing away. It does not. And a God who took the missing away would only be taking them from me a second time, and I would not stand for it. I grieve them. I will grieve them until I go to them. But the grief has a floor under it now that it did not have in that kitchen, and the floor is Him, and it holds.
There is a line from that same book of Job I could not bear to hear ten years ago. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. When the comforters laid it on me over their casseroles I wanted to put them through the window, and I was right to, because in their mouths it was a lid pressed down over my grief. But it is not a lid. It is the hardest and truest thing a wrecked man can ever come to say, and he cannot say it at the beginning, he can only say it at the end, on the far side of all of it, once he has stopped needing it to mean that the loss did not matter and has finally understood that it means the Giver is good still, even with His hands empty.
I say it now. I came here today, on the day I lost her, to say it, and to hold their picture, and to thank Him. Not for the crash. Never once for the crash. For them. For having been given them at all. For where they are now. And for coming down into the market after me, so that one day I will not only go to them, I will go to Him, and find that they had been with Him the whole time, waiting, just up the road I was never strong enough to walk. The road He walked all the way down to get me.
That is the smile you could not read.
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