Four In the Morning and Dry

The ovens are coming up and the whole back of the shop is starting to smell like the reason people live near a bakery.

Three forty in the morning. Tariq has the second mix going, the proofer full, and a tray of the seeded ones already scored and waiting. There is one light on over the bench and the rest of the room is the orange of the oven doors. Outside the window it is completely black and there is one car going somewhere.

He kills the mixer, unhooks the bowl, and tips the dough out onto the bench in one soft weight.

And he says the words.

Six of them. Short. The ones his father said over dough in a different country with a different alphabet on the sign outside, said quickly, said under the breath, said in the two seconds while the dough settles and before your hands go in.

Six years Tariq has said them. Every mix. Every night.

He has not felt one of them since spring.

He could tell you the week it went. Nothing happened. There was no crisis and there was nobody to blame and he did not stop believing anything. The words just stopped arriving anywhere. He says them, and they go out into the room, and the room is a room.

So he has been carrying that around for months the way a man carries a stone in his shoe when he is too far from home to stop and take it out. He says the words. He feels nothing. He is fairly sure this makes him a fraud, and he has not said that sentence to anybody, because who would he say it to at four in the morning.

His hands go into the dough.

Behind him the new kid, seventeen, second week, drops a tray and says sorry twice.

Then the kid says: what is that you say? You say it every time.

Tariq keeps his hands moving. My father said it, he says.

And the kid comes over and stands at the end of the bench with flour on his forearms and says: say it slower. I want to learn it.

The ovens hit temperature and the light on the front panel goes green.

You know that stone in the shoe.

Maybe yours is not a bakery. Maybe it is a prayer at a bus stop, or a habit of reading four verses before the house gets up, or the fact that you still put your hand on the door frame on the way out the way somebody taught you thirty years ago. And you have been doing it into a room that is a room, and you have decided in private that this makes you a fraud. You are inside a covenant that is being kept from Christ's side on the days you feel nothing at all. Scripture has a whole vocabulary for the dry land and never once files it under sin, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man's mouth moving over the bench while nothing is arriving.

Dryness is a land, not a verdict

Let me hand you the verse, because the location it was written in is the whole point.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

Read where he is standing. Not in a good season, looking back at a bad one. He is in it. A dry and thirsty land where no water is, present tense, and he is saying my God in the middle of it with nothing coming up out of the ground.

And then look at what happened to those words. They did not stay in his tent. They went into the Psalter, which is the songbook of a whole people, and a congregation sang them together, out loud, in a building, for centuries. The thirst got written into the corporate worship of the church.

That is worth sitting with. The bride in Scripture is the church, a whole company, and this company has always sung the dry seasons as part of its own liturgy rather than as an interruption to it. Nobody edited this psalm out for being low. It is not a private crisis somebody had. It is a song the people were given to sing.

You are inside a company whose songbook has your season in it already, and it was put there on purpose. That is written, in a psalm the church has sung for three thousand years, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old man's thirst into a sentence that fits your mouth at four in the morning. The dryness is not the evidence against you. It is a land, and Scripture has been to it.

What the words are doing when you feel nothing

Here is the thing I most want to hand you, and it takes the pressure off in a way I do not think you are expecting.

The words were never a transmitter you are supposed to feel working.

We have absorbed the idea somewhere that a prayer with heat behind it is real and a prayer without heat is a performance, and that idea is not in Scripture and it does a great deal of quiet harm. Half the psalms are people saying true things with no heat available. The heat is weather. The covenant is climate, and they are measured with different instruments.

So what is happening when Tariq says six words into a room that stays a room?

He is agreeing with something. That is all a faithful act ever is. He is putting his mouth on the side of a true thing at a moment when his feelings have nothing to add, and the truth of the thing is not being supplied by him.

You have been faithful in every one of those mornings, and none of it counted less for being unfelt. The word says the thirst itself was worship and got written down as worship, and the same Spirit who moved that psalmist is the one at work in a man over a bench at four. Nothing in the sentence requires the man to feel anything for the sentence to be true.

And I am not going to hand you a plan for getting the feeling back. That is where a message like this usually goes and it is a trap, because it turns your dryness into a problem you are now failing to solve on top of everything else.

You are held today exactly as you were held in March, and the holding was never on your side of it. Scripture puts the keeping of this covenant on Christ, plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a night shift, and there is no version of it where a dry man is further away.