Failures Yes, Sadness No

She can bring Him anything that needs dealing with, and she does, and she is good at it.

Confession is not a difficulty. She is honest with God to a degree that would surprise most people who know her; there is nothing in her life she has not put into words in front of Him, including two things she has never said to another human being. She does not dress anything up. She names it, she does not make excuses, she asks for help and she means it.

She is forty five and she has been doing that since she was nineteen.

Here is what she noticed in July, sitting in the car outside her mother's house, which is not the sort of place a person expects to notice things.

She had had a bad week. Not a sinful week. A sad one. Something had happened at work that was nobody's fault and could not be fixed, and a friendship had gone thin in a way she could not name, and she was tired in the manner that sleep does not touch.

And she went to pray about it, in the car, the way she does, and she got about four words in and stopped.

Because there was nothing to confess. There was no failure in it anywhere. There was nothing to ask for, either, because there was nothing anybody could do.

It was just sadness.

And she found, with real surprise, that she did not know how to bring it. There was no shape for it. Every prayer she has ever prayed has had a request in it or a repentance in it, and this had neither, and she sat there with her hands on the wheel and could not work out what a person says.

In the end she said, "Sorry, I do not know what I am asking for," and started the car.

You know that gap. Yours may be arranged differently. But you know what it is to have a full and honest relationship with God in one direction and to have never once brought Him something that simply hurt.

Both halves in one line

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes a criticism of your prayer life it will be unjust, and you have a better prayer life than most.

You are received with a sadness that has nothing to confess in it, and you were never admitted on the strength of a fault. Deuteronomy 32:18 names a God who begat you and gave you birth, and neither of those is a tribunal, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a plain grief in.

The pit is not distance. You are not distant from God; you are closer than nearly anybody. The pit is that you have one channel, and the channel is repair, and it was built early and it works beautifully, and there is no second one. So a sadness with no repair in it arrives at a door that only opens for things that need dealing with, and stands outside, and you have twenty six years of sadness on that step.

Here is the verse, and it is in a song Moses sang to a whole nation at the end of his life.

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18

Two halves. One God.

The first half is a begetting word: the Rock that begat thee. That is a father's word and it is strong and it is deliberate.

And the second half, in the Hebrew, is the word used for a woman bringing a child to birth. It is why a good many translations render that clause as the God who gave you birth. Moses put a begetting word and a birthing word in one line, about one God, and he did not think he was contradicting himself, and nobody has ever needed to smooth it out.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the two never travel apart. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Deuteronomy 32:18 does not make God half a father and half a mother, and it does not give Him a feminine side. It uses two pictures, both chosen by Him, to describe one God whom neither picture exhausts. He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the pictures stay exactly the shape He gave them.

And notice what neither of them is. Neither is a repair word. Begetting and giving birth are not what somebody does about a problem; they are what somebody is toward a person, before any problem exists.

You are welcome in with a grief that has no fault in it, and you were never admitted on the strength of something to confess. Deuteronomy 32:18 holds both halves in one line about one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a plain sadness through a door that has only ever been used the other way.

Take that in the car, and know it is not my kindness, it is what is written. You are dealing with a God who both begat you and gave you birth, and neither of those requires you to bring Him a case. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens a second channel in a woman who has had one for twenty six years.