Sorry Enough Is Not A Threshold

The mailbox at the top of the lane had a dent in it from a delivery truck the summer Dale turned eleven, and nobody had ever straightened it.

He parked beside it most Sundays. Not in the lane. Beside the mailbox, up on the grass verge, with the engine off and the window down two inches, close enough to see the roof of the house and the blue of the tarp still over the woodpile.

He had been doing it since February.

What he was waiting for was hard to say out loud, so he had never said it out loud, but it went something like this: he was waiting to feel it properly. He wanted to arrive at that door carrying the real thing. Not the tidy version, not the version that had a defense running underneath it like a second track, but the whole weight of it, the way it had landed on him at four in the morning the week it all came apart.

He could get near that feeling sometimes. He could get himself right up to the edge of it sitting in the cab. And then it would slide off, the way a word slides off when you reach for it, and he would be left sitting there checking his own chest like a man checking a dipstick. Not deep enough. Not yet.

Nineteen Sundays.

Some of those Sundays he cried and it still did not seem to count, because he could not tell whether he was sorry for what he had done or sorry about what it had cost him, and he had decided somewhere along the way that the second kind was worthless.

Some of those Sundays he felt nothing at all, and those were the worst ones, because a man who feels nothing has clearly not repented and has no business knocking on anybody's door.

And underneath all of it, running quiet, was the thing he had believed since he was a boy in a hard pew: that sorrow is the fare. That there is a depth you have to get down to, and God is standing at that depth with His arms folded, and everything shallower than that is just noise a person makes to feel better about himself.

On the nineteenth Sunday, with the light going gold across the top field and a dog barking somewhere down past the barn, he said it out loud in the cab, to nobody.

"I do not think I can get there."

He sat with that for a long minute. And then a second sentence arrived behind it, and it did not sound like his own voice.

Nobody ever asked you to get there.

If you have been sitting up on some verge of your own, measuring your own chest and finding it shallow, come and sit in the passenger seat a minute. I want to show you where that idea did not come from.

Nobody was ever weighing it

Here is the verse everybody quotes at people like Dale, and almost nobody finishes.

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.Joel 2:13

Read the word in the middle of it. For. That word is doing the heaviest lifting in the sentence and it gets skipped every time.

Turn, for He is gracious. The reason offered is not your grief. The reason offered is His character. God is not saying come back when the sorrow reaches a certain level; He is saying come back, and here is the sort of God waiting at the other end of that turn, and that is the whole argument. Look at what He lists about Himself: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness. Not one of those four is a measurement of you.

And the line just above it, where He says come with weeping and mourning, is immediately qualified by rend your heart and not your garments. He is not asking for a bigger display. He is asking for a real direction instead of a torn shirt.

Because that is what the word means. The word underneath repentance, in the Hebrew of the prophets, is the ordinary word for turning around and going back. It is what you do at a wrong gate. It is not a depth, it is a direction, and a direction does not have a minimum. You are turned in the right direction the moment you turn, and Joel 2:13 makes the reason His kindness rather than your intensity, and the Holy Spirit does not require a certain heart rate before He calls that repentance.

Now hear what Hosea does with it, because he puts it in the first person plural.

Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.Hosea 6:1

Come, and let us. That is somebody standing beside you saying it with you, which is exactly what you needed and exactly what nobody offered. You are not standing at that gate on your own, and Hosea 6:1 is a whole nation saying the sentence together, and the Spirit who put those words in the prophet's mouth is not an examiner watching you from the far side of the fence.

Then Paul, in one line, turns the whole traffic around.

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?Romans 2:4

The goodness leads to the repentance. Not the repentance to the goodness. Read the direction of the arrow in that sentence, because every one of us has it pointed the other way by instinct. We think we generate the sorrow, then it buys the mercy, then the mercy arrives. Paul says the mercy has been out ahead of you the whole time, walking toward you, and the turning is what happens to a person when goodness catches up. It is already yours as a gift and not as a result, and Romans 2:4 puts God's kindness first in the sentence. The drawing in your chest at this moment is the Holy Spirit leading, and it did not start with you.

Somebody is going to be holding a verse about godly sorrow, so let us look at it plainly rather than around it. Paul does say there is a sorrow that comes from God and does its own work. Notice what he says that work is: it produces the turning. It is a thing God gives, not a toll a person raises. Grief that comes from Him moves your feet. Grief you manufacture to qualify with just keeps you in the truck.

And there is one more thing, which is the reason none of this can be squeezed into a requirement.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Therefore have I drawn thee. The drawing is His work and the everlasting love is the reason for it. You were being drawn on those nineteen Sundays, in the truck, in the silence, in the ones where you felt nothing, and what is written in Jeremiah 31:3 is that the loving came first and the drawing came out of it, and His Spirit has been doing that quietly for longer than you have been aware of it.