A Photograph I Open Too Often

It is not even a photograph she took. Somebody put it on a group four years ago and she saved it.

The hall from the outside, on an ordinary afternoon, with the doors propped and two cars parked badly and a green wheelie bin in shot.

She grew up in that building. Her father set the chairs out for thirty years and there is a particular sound the doors make that she could pick out of a hundred recordings.

She lives four hundred miles away now, for good reasons, and she is not unhappy. She has a life. She goes to a church here that is fine, and she means fine, and she has been there three years and could tell you eleven people's names.

She opens that picture, if she is honest with herself, three or four times a week.

She does not look at it for long. Ten seconds. She does not zoom in and she does not scroll to the others. She opens it, looks, and shuts the phone, usually in the evening, usually when the day has been a lot.

And in March her sister said something, not unkindly, about how you cannot live in the past.

And she agreed with her, because the alternative was a conversation she did not want to have, and she has been quietly ashamed of the whole thing ever since.

Because she is forty-two years old and she looks at a picture of a building with a wheelie bin in it several times a week, and she cannot make that sound like anything except a woman who has not moved on.

The psalm faints for the courts, and says so out loud

Let me answer your sister first, since she is in the room whether you like it or not.

She is right that a person cannot live in the past. She is wrong about what she is looking at, and she is wrong because she has only ever seen the outside of it, which is a woman with a phone.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as permission to indulge yourself: what you have been calling nostalgia is a hunger with a name, and the name is in the Psalms. That is not my kind reading of a small private habit, it is what stands written in the eighty-fourth, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that page has been in your evenings for four years.

Read it, and notice that the psalmist is not embarrassed in the slightest.

How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.Psalm 84:1-2

Faints. And then, in case anybody thought that was only a mood: my heart and my flesh.

He is not longing for God in the abstract. He is longing for a place, by name, with courts and a doorway and sparrows nesting in the roof, and the whole psalm is about wanting to be in a particular building.

And the psalm does not correct him for it. It ends with him saying he would rather be a doorkeeper there than anything else anywhere.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better attitude: the ache is legitimate and it is in the songbook, because the written word puts a man's flesh crying out for a specific place and never once calls it living in the past, and the Spirit of God is the one who put a hall with a wheelie bin in front of you three or four times a week.

Now let me say where the line goes, because that is the whole business of this and it is what your sister could not have known.

You are not homesick for a building, whatever your sister thinks, because what is written puts the flesh crying out for the living God and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the calling. The doors made that noise because of who was going through them. Your father set out chairs in that room for thirty years, and eleven people knew what was happening in your life without being told, and there was a Sunday in your twenties that you have never described to anybody.

The building is where all of that is stored, and when you open the picture your soul goes to the picture and then keeps going.

What is written says the heart and the flesh cry out for the living God, and it says it in the middle of a psalm about a place, which means Scripture itself is entirely comfortable with an ache that arrives through an address. The Holy Spirit is at the end of that line and He has been the whole time, and the picture is the door and not the room.

And the rule that holds all of this: through, not at. A photograph of a hall is a photograph of a hall. Everything that goes up that line goes past it, to Him.