Deep Calling and No Words For It

The record player belonged to his father in law and it has a lid that does not stay up and a stack of records that is mostly not his taste and that he has never got rid of.

Thursday evening. Two friends, one on the sofa, one in the chair that everybody fights over. Mugs. The lamp on because it goes dark at four now.

Somebody has put on something ordinary. Not sacred. Not sad. Something from about 1974 with strings in it that anybody would put on.

And about forty seconds in, without any warning at all, his eyes go.

He gets up. He says something about the kettle. He stands in the kitchen with both hands on the counter and gets it back under control, which takes about fifteen seconds, and then he fills the kettle he does not need to fill and goes back in.

This is the fourth time in three weeks.

Once at a service, which at least made sense. Twice in the car. And now here, over a record with strings in it, in a room with two men he has known for twenty years and could not possibly explain this to.

He is not sad. He has checked and checked. There is nothing to be sad about, and that is exactly what makes it so unnerving, and he has begun to wonder, quietly, whether something is wrong with him.

Brother, come into the kitchen for a minute. Because there is one line in a psalm about two deep places calling to each other, and I think it is the most useful sentence in the book for a man standing at a counter with both hands on it.

Deep calling to deep

Psalm 42 is written by somebody a long way from home who is having a bad time and says so. And in the middle of it, this.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

Deep calleth unto deep.

Two deeps. One of them calls and the other one answers. And the image is water: something enormous and out of sight, and something else enormous and out of sight, and a sound passing between them that has nothing to do with the surface at all.

That is the best description anybody has ever given of what happened to you at forty seconds into a record with strings in it. Something went past the surface entirely and something in you answered before your head had any say in the matter.

You are experiencing a deep in you answering a deep that is not you, and the psalm treats that exchange as ordinary rather than alarming. That is not a way of dressing up a wobble; Psalm 42:7 puts the calling between two deeps and does not once suggest a fault in the man it is happening to, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm written by an exile and stands it up in a living room with a record player that will not stay open. What answered was not weakness. It was the part of you that is deep.

Now the second half, and it is about the embarrassment, which is the actual thing you are managing.

You left the room. That was not cowardice, it was competence: you have a lifetime of being the steady one and the steady one does not leak in front of people over a record.

But look at how Scripture handles men and their eyes. Joseph goes out and weeps and comes back and washes his face. David weeps until he has no more power to weep. Peter goes outside and weeps bitterly. Jesus wept, and it is two words long and it is in the book on purpose.

There is not a single verse anywhere that treats a man's tears as a defect in him.

You have wept in a room and the book has no verdict against you for it, and it never once had one against the men in it. John 11:35 is two words and it is about the Lord Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a shortest verse in the Bible into a permission slip for a man standing at a kitchen counter.

What this is not, and what I will not do with it

Let me be careful now, because this is exactly where people get hurt.

I am not going to tell you what this means. I do not know. Nobody who has not lived your life knows, and anybody who tells you confidently after four paragraphs is selling something.

It might be God stirring something in you that will make sense in a year. It might be grief you never processed arriving late, which is a thing that happens to men in their forties constantly and is not a spiritual event. It might be exhaustion. It could be more than one of those at once, and if it goes on and it worries you, a doctor is a sensible person to talk to, and that is not a failure of faith.

What I will tell you is what is not true, which is that something is wrong with you. That is the conclusion you have been quietly forming, and it is the only one I can rule out with confidence.

You are not broken, and a deep in a man answering something is described in that book as a thing that happens rather than a thing that goes wrong. Psalm 42:8 says the Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime and in the night His song shall be with me, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man company in exactly the hour he cannot explain himself.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say something about the kettle.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how composed you are on a Thursday. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.