The Headland Instead

Ten to eleven on a Sunday, and the car goes up the lane out of pure muscle memory.

She parks in the gravel pull-in at the top, where the tarmac gives up, and she sits a moment with the keys still in her hand, because ten to eleven is a time her body knows. Then she gets out and pulls the door hard twice, because the latch has been going since last spring.

The headland path starts at a stile with a broken step. After the stile there is nothing but gorse and wind and the long green shoulder of the land going out toward the water, and on a still morning the bells carry across from the village, thin and slightly out of order, the way bells are.

She walks to the marker stone at the point and back. It takes forty minutes. Forty minutes is exactly how long the service used to run, and she has never once said that out loud to another human being, because saying it would turn it into a statement, and it is not a statement. It is a walk.

At the point there is a stone with a name cut into it and a date worn down so far that only the last two figures are left. She puts her hand flat on the top of it every single time, and every single time it is colder than the air.

And every time, somewhere between the stone and the second gate on the way back, she prays. Not out loud. Not in sentences that would survive being written down. Mostly it is one word repeated with a great deal of walking in between, and once or twice a year it is something that comes up out of her hard enough that she has to stop and stand still on the path with her eyes shut and her coat pulling in the wind.

Then she drives home and puts the oven on.

Here is what she cannot get past. She thinks it counts as nothing.

Not because anybody told her so. Nobody has said one word to her about it, which is its own kind of loud. She thinks it because there is a shape in her head of what Sunday is meant to look like, and she is not in the shape, and the arithmetic she does at the second gate always comes out the same. Whatever that was, it was not the real thing. God is being very kind about it. And kindness is what a person gets instead of the real thing.

Two years of Sundays. The bells over the water. Her hand flat on a cold stone. And a register somewhere in her head with her name on a line and nothing written beside it.

The three places He was not

There is a man in Scripture who is as far outside as a person can get.

He is not on a headland. He is in a cave on a mountain, a long way further south than he had any business being, having walked away from everything with a price on his head and a settled conviction that he is the last one left. He has not attended anything in weeks. Nobody knows where he is. He is not sulking and he is not backslidden. He is exhausted and he is finished, and he is entirely alone.

And God does not send for him. God comes out to the mouth of the cave.

You have been on that path every Sunday with company you could not see, and that is not my sentiment, it is what happens in 1 Kings 19 when the Lord goes out to a man who is nowhere near the assembly, and the Holy Spirit who moved the writer to record it did not preserve that scene for two and a half thousand years so it could apply to everybody except the one reading it on a Tuesday.

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:11-12

Everybody remembers the still small voice. Look at how many words the passage spends on the other thing. Three times, in three sentences, with the same flat construction: the Lord was not in it. Not in the wind that broke the rocks. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire.

Those are the three most impressive things that happened on that mountain, and God declined all three.

He is not obliged to be where the size is. He never has been. And a woman doing her arithmetic at the second gate is measuring her Sunday against the wind and the earthquake and the fire, and coming up short against three things He was not in.

You have not been graded on volume. Scripture had a chance to put God in the loudest thing available on that mountain and pointedly did not, and the same Spirit who carried that decision into the text has been keeping a small, unimpressive, walking prayer alive in you for two years.

Now the guardrail, and I want to be straight about it, because a real person is reading this and a real person acts on what a page says. This message does not know your situation. It is not telling you to go back and it is not telling you to stay out. Nothing here is a verdict on the building, and nothing here is a verdict on the path. Anybody who gives you one of those from a distance is guessing, and there are enough people guessing about you already.

What can be said with no guessing at all is about God, not about your Sunday morning. You were never outside of Him. The word says nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and that list is exhaustive on purpose, and the word "nothing" is in it because His Spirit put it there.

And then the other half of it. Elijah was certain he was the only one, and he was wrong by a factor of seven thousand. He was not told that to shame him. He was told it because it was true and because he needed it, and being the only one is the thing loneliness always says and almost never is.