The Noise Was Covering the Quiet

She has a playlist that is eleven hours long and she made it herself and she knows exactly why she made it that long, which is so that it never has to end.

Adaeze is thirty seven. She lives on her own in a good flat with a balcony. She has a job people are impressed by, and about forty people who would say she was a friend of theirs, and a family who ring, and she is, by every measurement anybody can see, doing extremely well.

She stopped drinking in October. Not because it had become a crisis. Because she noticed the shape of it: that it happened at exactly the same hour every evening, and that the hour was the hour she came in and put the light on.

And what she has learned since October is the thing she cannot say out loud at a dinner table, which is that the drinking was never really the point. The drinking was one of the things she used. The playlist is another. The television that goes on the second she is through the door is another. The podcast in the shower is another.

All of them do the same job. They are noise, and the noise is there because of what is underneath the noise, and what is underneath is a loneliness so old and so quiet that she does not really think of it as a feeling anymore. It is more like the temperature of the room.

She took one of the coverings away in October. The rest are still running. And the thing underneath has not moved at all.

You know that quiet. It might be a playlist, a screen, a schedule so full that no ten minutes go unspent. Something got taken away, and the thing it was covering was still there, exactly the same size, waiting.

You are met exactly where the ache is, and you were never going to be reached only after it had been fixed. The psalm says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, which is a statement about position rather than about repair; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes nigh mean something in a good flat with a balcony at seven in the evening.

The Lord is nigh

Let me be careful here, because this is exactly the place where people start explaining other people to themselves, and I am not going to do that to you.

I do not know why the quiet in your room feels the way it does. I am not going to trace it back to something, because I cannot see it and a page cannot diagnose anybody. And I am not going to tell you that sorting it out is what will keep you standing, because that would hang your whole life on a piece of work nobody has assigned you and would put the weight in exactly the wrong place.

What I can tell you is where God is described as standing.

The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh. Near. It is a word about distance, and the psalm makes the near thing the whole promise. It does not say the Lord mends them that are of a broken heart, though He does. It does not say He explains it. The sentence that got written down is about where He is standing relative to a person in that condition, and where He is standing is close.

You have God nearby as the actual promise, and you were never being offered proximity as a consolation for something better. That is what stands written in Psalm 34, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes nearness a real event in a room with an eleven hour playlist in it.

And notice who He is near to. Not the ones who have understood their brokenness. Not the ones who can name it, or who have done the work, or who could give an account of it at a dinner table. Them that are of a broken heart. The qualification is the condition itself, which means you already meet it, without doing anything at all.

You are already inside the category the promise names, and you were never going to have to explain yourself into it. Scripture makes the condition the qualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a woman who cannot say out loud what is underneath the noise.

And there is something else about that psalm worth having. It is the one that also says taste and see that the Lord is good, and this is the man who wrote it: David, on the run, having just pretended to be insane to get out of a city alive. That psalm is not written from a comfortable place. The nearness it describes is nearness in the mess, reported by somebody in it.

You are being met by a nearness that was described from inside the trouble, and you were never handed a promise written from somewhere safe. The written word carries that psalm's own address in its heading, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it credible for somebody sitting alone in a flat at seven in the evening.

And the plain thing, said here as everywhere on this site, and meant. What is underneath the noise is worth taking to somebody trained to sit with it. A counselor is not a failure and it is not a lesser road; a good one is God's kindness with a face and an appointment time. And the friend, the doctor, the room where people sit in a circle and say true things. Every one of those is a way He does this, and using them takes nothing away from anything.