Eight Months on a Job Site

The trailer, the site, and a phone call at nine. That is the whole of his life at the moment and it has been for eight months.

He is four states from home. It is good money and it is finite and there is a date on it, and he can tell you how many weeks are left without looking, which is probably not a good sign but is not the point.

The work is fine. He likes the crew. There is a man from Tennessee who makes him laugh most days.

Here is what he has not said at nine o'clock on any of those calls.

He has not felt anything since he got here.

Not homesick, which he expected and which would be manageable. Not sad. Nothing. He gets up, he works, he eats, he calls, he sleeps, and inside all of that there is a room where something used to be and now there is not.

He has done the obvious things. He has read on the phone in the trailer at night. He has put something on and listened while driving. It goes over him. He has caught himself twice standing at the edge of the site at the end of a day, looking at nothing in particular, for longer than a man stands anywhere.

The sentence, unsaid: I do not think anything went wrong, and something has gone quiet anyway.

You may know that stretch. Nothing broken, nothing to point at, and nothing in you either.

He wrote it a long way from home

There is a psalm written by somebody displaced, and everything about the setting matters.

The writer is not in Jerusalem. He says so. He is somewhere north, near the headwaters, and he keeps saying that he remembers what it used to be like to go up with the crowd and that he cannot do it now.

And then, in the middle of the noise of the water, he writes this.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

Read where the calling happens. Not in the temple. Not in the good week. It happens in the noise, in the far country, in a place the man is describing as waves going over him.

And notice what the two deeps are. Something in him and something in God, calling to each other, in a stretch when he has none of the things he associates with God being near.

You are being called to from somewhere deeper than the flatness, and Psalm 42:7 puts deep calling to deep in the middle of a displaced man's worst stretch, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a line written near the headwaters and lands it on a man standing at the edge of a site at the end of a day.

Nothing in the psalm gets fixed

Consider how the whole psalm behaves, because it is unusual and it is exactly what he needs.

The writer asks himself, twice, why he is cast down. He tells himself to hope in God, twice. And he never once reports that the feeling changed. The psalm ends without the man feeling better, and that is how it is preserved, in the book, permanently.

Which means Scripture has made permanent room for a person who is doing everything right and reporting nothing. Nobody edited that out because it was not encouraging enough.

You are inside a psalm that never resolves and was kept anyway, because the written word preserves a man who talks to himself twice and still ends flat, and His Spirit is what turns that from a curiosity into permission.

And notice what he does report. Thirst. He begins the whole thing with a deer panting for water, which is not a feeling of God's presence. It is the felt absence of it, described accurately, and God let that stand as the opening line.

You have a thirst that is being reported and not corrected, and Psalm 42 opens on the absence rather than on the arrival, and the same Spirit who kept that psalm in the book is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Eight months in a trailer four states from home, with one phone call a day and nothing felt since he arrived, is a real isolation and it is doing something whether or not it is being felt. Tell a doctor plainly about the eight months of nothing, using those words, because a sustained flatness is medical information and not a report on his character. Ask about a counselor, which is available by phone and is exactly the arrangement for a man with a trailer and a date on the calendar. And on the next nine o'clock call, say one true sentence instead of the fine he has been giving.

And if the nothing has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it on the phone is not putting something on anybody. You are held exactly as much on the night you say it as on the eight months you did not, because Psalm 42:7 has a displaced man write the whole thing down without resolving it, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that true in the body rather than only in a poem.