Four Strangers and a Crossword

The seat reservations came out of the machine in the wrong order and nobody has said anything about it, so the four of them are at a table together for three hours by accident.

Two laptops. A man about sixty with a folded newspaper doing the crossword in pen, which everybody at that table has quietly noticed and respected. A young woman with headphones who is not listening to anything, which is a thing people do.

And her, by the window, with a book she has read four pages of.

Somewhere past the second big station the man with the crossword says, out loud, to nobody, that eleven across is a disgrace. And that is all it takes. Within ten minutes there are four people at that table on eleven across. One of the laptops has closed. The headphones have come off. Somebody has an opinion about anagram indicators and somebody else has a better one. It is, briefly and completely, a small good thing happening between strangers.

She joins in and she is good at it and she gets fourteen down.

And under it all there is a thing running that she has never described to anybody, which is a sort of accounting. Because she believes, and has believed for a long time without ever putting it into words, that closeness costs a secret. That the way people become genuinely near to one another is by handing something over, and that since she is never going to hand hers over, there is a ceiling on everything, including with God.

Sit down here across the table from me, and let me say the sentence that matters most first. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not today, not one day, not as a braver version of you. I will not guess what it is and I will not offer a list. Nothing here wants the thing itself, and a person who never tells another living soul is a whole person and a whole reader of this site.

The traffic is going the other way

There is a line in Psalm 25 that is nearly always read as if it were about us, and it is not.

The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.Psalm 25:14

Read whose secret it is.

It is His. The secret of the LORD. The older sense of that word is a confidence, a private counsel, the sort of thing a person says to a friend and not to a room. And the verse says that God has such a thing, and that He shares it, and it names who He shares it with.

Then the second half says the same thing again in plainer words. He will shew them his covenant. He shows. He is the one disclosing.

Nowhere in that verse is anybody handing anything to God.

Which means the whole accounting you have been running is upside down. Nearness with God is not a transaction where you pay in with what you have and get let closer. He already knows the whole of yours. What He is proposing is that He tells you His.

You are being confided in by God rather than audited by Him, and you were never going to buy nearness with a disclosure. I am not offering you an easier arrangement. The written word puts the secret in His possession and the showing in His hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a woman at a table seat with a book she is not reading.

What closeness is actually made of

And now let me say something plain about people, because the belief runs there too.

You think intimacy is made of disclosure. It is a common belief and there is a half truth in it, and the half truth has cost you a great deal.

Watch what happened over eleven across. Nobody disclosed anything. Four people who will never meet again spent an hour genuinely together, and what they had was attention, and shared work, and being in the same thing at the same time.

That is most of what closeness is actually made of, and it always was. The handing over of secrets is one door into a room, and it is not the room, and there are other doors, and some of them are simply staying in your seat.

You are able to be genuinely near to people without handing over one word, and you have that door open already. Scripture calls Abraham the friend of God and shows God telling him what He is about to do rather than the other way round, and it is His Spirit who makes a shared hour feel like company rather than a transaction unpaid.