I Know When to Close My Eyes

He timed it once, which he does not recommend.

Sunday morning, third song, and Nathan realized somewhere in the second verse that he was doing a thing with his face. Not putting it on. It was simply happening, in the same automatic way that his feet know the two steps up to his own front door in the dark.

So he watched himself for the rest of the song, which is an unpleasant experience and he does not advise it.

He knows when to close his eyes. He knows exactly which line of that song people close them on. He knows when to open them again, which is harder and more precise, because opening them at the wrong moment looks like leaving early.

He knows the small lift of the hand that is not a full raise, and when a full raise is appropriate and when it would be too much for that particular room.

He knows the sound to make in a prayer that is agreement and not interruption.

Sixteen years of Sundays and it is all in his body now, like a language he learned young.

And in the fourth song he asked himself a question that he has not been able to put down since, which was: what am I actually doing?

Not accusingly. He was not catching himself out. He genuinely wanted to know what the internal event was that his eyes were closing about, and he looked for it, and he could not find it.

There was nothing wrong. He was not distracted. He was not in sin, he was not angry with anybody, and he had slept fine.

The best way he has found to describe it since is that his hands and his face were doing something very well and there was nobody at home behind them.

He drove back and did not say anything about it to his wife, and he has been carrying it since March.

He is thirty-nine. He believes it. If you woke him at three in the morning he would tell you he believes it.

He just cannot find the place inside him that the third song is supposed to be coming out of.

And you may know that Sunday. You may know every cue in your own room, and you may have been fluent in it for years without anybody ever suspecting a thing, including you.

The verse is about a distance, not about a style

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since March and it was never yours.

You are not a fake. You never were. Scripture names a distance between lips and heart without ever calling the lips the problem, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a change of posture, who closes that distance in anybody. Set it down here. It is heavy and it has been sitting on you through every Sunday since.

Now hear the line, and hear what it is measuring.

These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.Isaiah 29:13

Notice what it does not say.

It does not say the mouths were wrong. It does not say the honoring was a bad idea, or that the forms should be scrapped, or that the people should have found a plainer way to do it.

It names a distance. Near with the mouth, far in the heart. That is a measurement, not a verdict on the vocabulary.

And measurements can change.

You are able to come near in the second sense too. Right now, on an ordinary morning, without changing one thing about how your church does anything. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who brings a heart in close, and He has never once required a man to abandon the room he belongs to first.

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly where people go wrong with this verse and I am not going to let it happen to you.

Nothing here is a complaint about your church, your songs, or the people around you closing their eyes. Those are not the problem and never were. Sixteen years in one room is a good thing and belonging is not a sin, and the person beside you with their hand half up may be more present than anybody in the building.

You cannot tell from the outside. Nobody can. That is the entire point of the verse and it cuts against the person quoting it every bit as much as anybody else.

So this is not about them and it is not about the style. It is about a distance you noticed in yourself in March and are honest enough not to look away from.

Here is the tender part. What has happened is not decay and it is not backsliding.

It is that a body can learn something so thoroughly that it no longer needs the person, and that is true of driving and of a language and of a hymn, and it happens to the most sincere people in the building precisely because they have been there longest.

You have not lost the thing. You have lost the seam between the thing and the doing of it, and Scripture calls that a distance, and His Spirit is the one who closes distances.