A Dry And Parched Land Is An Address

He stopped because there was nothing there and he has never once considered that the nothing might not be a verdict.

Here is how it went, and there is no drama in it, which is why nobody noticed.

It went quiet. That is all. Over about two years it went from something that was there to something that was not there, and he kept doing it for a while out of habit, and then he felt like a man talking into an empty room, and a man from where I am from does not do that for long.

So he stopped, and he told himself the honest reason, which was: there is nothing there.

And then a second sentence attached itself, and he has never separated the two.

And a man with nothing there has no business kneeling down.

That second one is doing all the damage. The first one is just a report on his weather. The second one is a ruling.

It has been eight years. He is fifty-four. And the dryness he treats as a disqualification has never been examined as anything else.

So let me ask you.

What if the dryness is where this gets done rather than why it cannot be?

Read the address on the psalm

There is a psalm that opens with a line everybody has heard and I want the last five words of it, because they are the location.

You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.Psalm 63:1

In a dry and parched land where there is no water.

That is not a description of a bad season he is remembering from a comfortable place. It is where he is standing while he writes it.

The seeking and the dryness are in the same sentence, at the same time, in the same location.

Psalm 63 has the seeking happening from inside the dry country rather than after leaving it, and the Spirit who gave that psalm put the parched ground into the address rather than into an excuse, so the dryness you have read as a disqualification has never once been the reason to stop.

Now, straight, the way we do it.

I am not going to tell you it was not dry. You are not a man who exaggerates and you did not imagine eight years of nothing.

And I am not going to promise you water on a schedule. Anybody who tells you when it comes back is selling something, and you would know it and you would be right to walk away.

What I am telling you is that the psalm was written by a man with no water, and it did not stop him from doing the thing.

Psalm 63 gives the words to somebody in the parched land itself, and the Spirit was in that writing while nothing was coming up, which means the second sentence you attached eight years ago was never in the text at all.

And look at the verb he uses. Earnestly I seek you. Present tense. Right now. In the dry.

He is not describing a good stretch. He is doing it, badly, in poor conditions, with nothing to show for it.

Psalm 63 has a man seeking in the exact conditions that make seeking feel pointless, and the Spirit was in that seeking rather than in any result from it, so kneeling down with nothing there has never once been a man talking into an empty room.