He Stopped Months Ago and Has Not Told Anybody

There was no moment. That is the thing he would want anybody to understand.

He did not sit down and conclude anything. There was no argument and no crisis and nothing happened that he could point at. It thinned out the way a habit thins out, over about four months, and then one week he noticed that he could not remember the last time.

And nothing about his life changed. That is the part that has started to bother him more than the stopping.

He still turns up to the same things. He still says the same words at the same points. Twice this year he has said something out loud in a room that another person found genuinely helpful, and both times he meant it, and both times he came home and did not say one word to anybody about anything.

Nobody knows. Not because he is hiding it. Because there is nothing visible to hide.

There is a psalm written by somebody in exactly this

There is a psalm where a man describes the state and does not resolve it, and the details are unusually specific.

My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God? (Psalm 42:3, King James Version)

Where is thy God.

He is being asked that by people around him. And the psalm is not written by somebody outside the arrangement. It is written by a man who then spends the next several verses remembering that he used to lead a procession into the house of God with the voice of joy.

That is a man who was in it and is not currently, and who has written down both facts and put them next to each other.

You are not the first person to be in the room and not in it. Psalm 42 keeps the remembering and the current state in the same psalm, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old song feel like it describes somebody at a pump at first light.

He talks to himself, out loud, in the text

The most useful thing in that psalm is the form of it, and it is worth noticing.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. (Psalm 42:5)

He is addressing himself.

That is not a prayer and it is not a conversation. It is a man speaking to his own soul in the second person, out loud, because there is nothing else currently available and he is not going to sit in silence.

And he does it three times in that psalm and the next one. The same question, twice more, because it does not resolve the first time.

You are given a form to use when nothing else is available. Psalm 42 has a man addressing his own soul out loud and repeating it, and it is His Spirit who makes an old form usable by somebody with nothing to say upward.

And he says the accusing part too

Four verses later the same man says something that is not careful at all.

I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? (Psalm 42:9)

Why hast thou forgotten me.

He is not building a case, and he is not resolving it either. He says it and moves on and comes back to the question about his soul.

What that tells you is that the psalm was not written by somebody who had it sorted and was describing a past low point. It is written from inside, and it was kept in that form.

You are not required to have it resolved to say it. Psalm 42 keeps the accusation unresolved and repeats the question after it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unresolved song feel like company.

Jesus said the arrangement was going to change

There is a sentence the night before He died that says something about what comes next, and it is not what the eleven wanted to hear.

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you. (John 16:7)

It is expedient for you that I go away.

He is telling men who had spent three years with Him physically present that the next arrangement is better, and that the arrangement they are about to lose was the temporary one.

They did not experience it that way at the time. Nothing in the chapter suggests they did.

You are inside the arrangement He called the better one. John 16 has Him saying it plainly to people who could not feel it, and it is the Holy Spirit, the Comforter named in that same verse, who is what He is talking about.

And somebody else does the asking when nothing comes

There is a sentence in Romans about exactly the situation where a man has nothing.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26)

We know not what we should pray for as we ought.

Paul is not describing laziness and he is not describing rebellion. He is describing not knowing, and not having, and the words not being available.

And the answer given is not that a man should find the words. It is that somebody else is handling it, in a form that has no words in it at all.

You have somebody doing the asking through a stretch with nothing in it. Romans 8 describes the words being unavailable and does not treat it as a failure, and it is the Spirit Himself who is named as making the request.