Before They Call the Rows

Gate twenty-two, which is right at the far end, past the bit where the moving walkway stops working and everybody has to walk normally again and finds it faintly insulting.

Forty minutes on the board. The desk is not staffed yet. There are about sixty people already sitting down, which is more than there need to be, because everybody in an airport arrives at a gate too early and then sits there.

A man doing a crossword on a phone. A family with a child asleep across two seats in the way only a small child can manage. Somebody on a call being very slightly too loud about a delivery date. A woman going along the row collecting the cups people have left, who does not work there and who is simply doing it.

She has a window seat booked and a bag she has packed a hundred times.

And forty minutes at a gate is one of the great empty spaces in modern life, and she used to fill it by talking to God, and she has not done that for three years.

The reason is a phrase. Pour out your heart. She read it years ago and loved it and lived on it, and then somewhere in a hard stretch, out of what another person did to her, she began to hear it as a requirement: that pouring out your heart means saying all of it, every part, itemized, and that anything less is holding back.

So she holds back. And a phrase she used to live on became the door that shut.

Let me say who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And before you brace: naming it is not a condition of anything here, and not naming it is not holding back, and I will not let it be called that.

A jar tipped over does not produce a list

Here is the verse, and then the picture inside it.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

The Hebrew behind pour out is what you do with water. It is the verb for emptying a vessel: tipping it up and letting the contents go out of it. It is used of libations poured out before God, and of a soul poured out in Hannah's prayer, and in every case it is a physical picture of a container being emptied rather than a report being delivered.

Now think about what that picture actually is.

A jar tipped over does not itemize. It does not present its contents in an order, and it does not name them, and nobody standing there receives a list. Something comes out, and where it goes is not the jar's business, and the whole action takes one movement.

That is what David is describing. Not a full account. An emptying.

You are invited to tip a jar rather than produce an inventory, and you were never asked to name what came out. I am not being lenient with the text. The written word uses a pouring verb and a container picture, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it to a woman with forty minutes at gate twenty-two.

At all times, which includes this state

And now the first half, because it is doing something you have needed for three years.

Trust in him at all times.

At all times is a phrase about circumstances, and it means the good ones and the other ones, and it specifically includes the state you are in when you would rather not be seen in it.

David wrote that psalm while he was being undermined by people who spoke well to his face. The whole thing is written from inside a situation that has not resolved. He does not say pour out your heart once it is presentable.

Which means the condition you have been waiting to get out of before you speak was included in the invitation by name.

You are invited to come in the state you are actually in, and you were never asked to wait for a better one. Scripture puts at all times in front of the invitation on purpose, and it is His Spirit, not a change in the situation, who makes an invitation like that reach somebody sitting in a row of gate seats.