The Bench She Still Walks To

The path runs along the top of the low cliffs for about a mile, and there is a bench at the bend where the gorse gives out and you can see the whole bay at once. Somebody's family put a small plate on the back of it years ago. The plate has gone green.

She has walked to that bench for eleven years. She knows the loose stone at the third stile. She knows which section holds water after rain and takes it wide. She knows the gulls sound different in the hour before the light goes.

She used to pray out loud here. Not loudly, but out loud, the way you talk to a person who is walking next to you, and she would arrive at the bench already halfway through a sentence. She would sit and finish it. She would name people. She would say the thing she was afraid of and then sit with the fear and the sea both in front of her, and then walk home lighter than she came.

She does not do that anymore.

She still walks. She still sits on the same slats, on the left side, because the right side has the split that catches a coat. She still stays about twenty minutes. And in those twenty minutes she says nothing at all, and has said nothing at all for a long time now, and if anybody asked her she would say she goes up there for the walk. It is easier than the true answer, which is that she goes up there because it is the one place she has ever met Him and she cannot make herself stop going, and she has no words to bring, and she has begun to suspect that arriving empty is worse than not arriving.

So she has quietly filed it under exercise. Fresh air. Good for you. And the gorse comes and goes and the plate on the back of the bench goes greener.

That is you, perhaps, on your own version of the bench. You keep going. You have kept the habit long after the talking left it, and somewhere in the keeping you have started to hear the quiet as an answer about you. That is what I have come to take off you, and I am not going to rush it, because you have not been rushed here and I am not going to be the one who hurries the one hour in your week that is yours.

The praying did not stop. The words did.

Let me start by refusing something, because a great deal of harm gets done in this exact spot by people meaning well.

I am not going to explain your silence to you. I am not going to tell you what season this is, or what God is teaching you in it, or hand you a reason that makes it tidy. I do not know why the words went, and anybody who tells you they do has told you about themselves. Assigning a purpose to your quiet would give you one more thing to carry up that path, and you are carrying enough.

What I will do is show you where the psalm puts the holding, because that is the part somebody swapped on you.

Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand.Psalm 73:23

Look at that word at the front. Nevertheless. Asaph has just spent seventy verses saying that his feet almost slipped, that he was envious of people who had it easy, that his heart was grieved and he was pricked in his reins, that he was as a beast before God. He is not writing from a good week. And then: nevertheless. Not therefore. Not once I got myself together. Nevertheless.

And then read who is doing the holding. Thou hast holden me by my right hand. Not: I kept a grip on Him. Not: I held on with what I had left. His hand around her hand, His fingers, His grip, and the tense is finished. It happened. It is holding.

You are held by a hand that closed around yours before the words went quiet, and it has not loosened by so much as a finger since. That is written, not felt, and it is written in Psalm 73:23 for exactly the person who cannot feel it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old line like that arrive as a present fact rather than a piece of information, and He is on that bench with you at twenty past four.

Here is the swap, and it is so common it barely gets noticed. Somewhere along the line, a person starts measuring the relationship by their own output in it. How much they said. How well they said it. Whether it felt like anything. Under that measurement, silence reads as absence, and absence reads as fault, and fault reads as a verdict, and now the bench is a courtroom instead of a place to sit.

You were never the one keeping this going, and you are not the one keeping it going now. The word says He is continually with you, which is a word about His steadiness and not about your consistency, and the Spirit who put that sentence in the Psalter did it so that a woman with nothing to say could sit down and still be with Him.

Nevertheless, and who is holding whom

The pit here is subtle, so I want to name it plainly. It goes: the quiet must mean something is missing, so if I can find the missing thing I can start the conversation again. And then the search begins. A sin not remembered. A key not turned. A word not said in the right order. Weeks go by like that, and the search is exhausting, and it is worse than exhausting, because the search itself teaches you that the holding depends on your finding.

There is no missing key. That sentence, the one that says you did not have enough faith and so the room went quiet, is not in the book and it is not true. Nobody in this story failed at anything. The hand did not open.

And I will not swap the subject on you either. I am not going to tell you that the real thing you needed was the presence all along and you have been given that, so let us call it a win and go home. That would be a verdict too, just a kinder sounding one. The thing you have carried up that path is a real thing and it is still real, and you are allowed to want it and still be sitting here without words.

You are with Him on that bench in the twenty minutes where nothing is said, and nothing about that is a lesser visit. Psalm 73:23 does not have a clause about being articulate. His Spirit is there in the pause between the gulls, and the sea is going on and the light is going, and it counts.