Reading It Like a Brochure

There are nineteen of them and they are all on the same shelf and Mairi could tell you which ones have the good photographs.

Diaries and memoirs and one dissertation somebody printed and bound at a copy shop. Accounts of years when something came down on a place: the islands, a mill town, a mission station, a college where the timetable stopped for a fortnight.

She has read some of them four times. She reads them slowly and she reads them at night and she has learned things from them that nobody else in her church knows.

And in the spring she noticed what she does when she finishes one.

She closes it. She sits for a minute. And then she gets up and moves around her own house looking at things without seeing them, and there is a very specific hollow in her chest, and it lasts maybe ten minutes, and if she is honest it is not longing for God. It is homesickness for a place she has never been.

Which is exactly what a person feels putting down a holiday brochure in February.

She said that to herself in those words, standing at her own sink, and she has not been able to get away from it since. I read them like a brochure.

Not like Scripture. Not like intercession. Like a catalogue of somewhere better, looked at from a cold house.

And what has come with that recognition is a second, less comfortable one, which is that in nineteen books and probably three hundred hours of reading she has never once prayed for her own road while she was doing it.

Not once.

She has prayed for revival. Genuinely, and for years, and with real ache. But it has always been a large word aimed at a large place, and it has never come down as far as the eleven houses she can see from her own front step.

She is forty-eight. She has lived on that road for sixteen years.

And you may have a shelf, or a playlist, or a set of accounts. And you may know exactly what the ten minutes after feels like.

The psalmist has the same material and does something else with it

Take this off before we go on, because you have carried it for years and it was never yours.

You are not wrong to read them and you are not wrong to want it. You never were. Scripture itself is full of people rehearsing what God did in earlier generations, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the quality of the account, who turns the reading into anything at all. Set the hollow down here at the sink. It is heavy, and it has been arriving every time you close a cover.

Now hear how the psalm handles exactly this material, because the opening line is a man with the same shelf.

We have heard it with our ears, O God; our ancestors have told us what you did in their days, in days long ago.Psalm 44:1

That is your shelf, in one sentence. Accounts of what God did in somebody else's days.

And watch what he does with it, because it is not what you have been doing. He does not close the scroll and wander round the house, because the written account was given to him to speak with and His Spirit is the one who turns it into speech. He turns and he speaks to God about now. The whole psalm is a man taking the old accounts and pressing them into the present, out loud, on behalf of the people he is actually standing among.

He is not visiting. He is arguing. He says, in effect: You are the one who did that, and these are the people in front of You today.

You are able to do that with your nineteen books. Right now, tonight, with the cover just shut. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who turns reading into prayer, and He has never once needed better material to work with.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches on both sides.

Nothing here says the shelf is a problem. Those books are a real good and you know things because of them. Keep the shelf. Keep reading.

And nothing here promises you a year like the ones in them. I cannot promise that and I will not try. Nobody arranged those, nobody earned them, and the fact that sixteen years on your road have been quiet is not a verdict on you, on your church or on your praying, and Scripture never once makes it anybody's fault. His Spirit moves where He pleases.

Here is the tender part. The hollow is not a sin and it is not sentimentality.

It is appetite that has been given nowhere to go. You have been reading in one direction for three hundred hours and never once turned the material round and pointed it at the eleven houses you can see from the step. So it has built up in you with no outlet, and it comes out as homesickness because that is what an appetite does when it has no address.

Scripture takes the old accounts and turns them into present tense speech, and His Spirit is the one who carries that, and neither of them ever asked you to stop reading. Only to turn round at the end.