What I Looked At Last Night

The bathroom, at twenty to two in the morning. He knows the room in that light better than he knows it in daylight: the crack in the tile by the pipe, the towel that never gets straight, the shape of his own face in a mirror he is not looking at.

He is not there for any reason. He came in to be somewhere that was not the other room. He stands there with the tap running for no reason at all, and the thought going round is not a complicated thought. It is four words long and it is the same four words every time.

Not again. Not again.

That is the whole scene. There is no drama in it. That is what people get wrong about this: they imagine something operatic, and it is a man standing on cold tiles at twenty to two feeling like the inside of a switched off television.

The next morning he is completely fine. He makes the packed lunches. He answers three emails before he leaves. He is good at his job and he is kind to the woman on the desk and he laughs at the thing somebody says in the lift. Nobody in that building would guess, and that is the part that does the damage, because the gap between what they see and what he knows is where the shame actually lives. Not in the night. In the ordinary Tuesday afterwards, carrying a private opinion of himself that nobody else in the world holds.

He has not told anybody. He is not going to. That decision was made years ago.

And if that is your bathroom, or your car, or the desk in the spare room where the screen is the only light in the house, I want to be very careful with you, because you have almost certainly been carrying this a long time and mostly what people do with it is either minimize it or crush you with it.

I am going to do neither. I am going to move your eyes.

The face that looks up is not the face that is covered

There is a line in the Psalms that I have never been able to get past, and it is short.

Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.Psalm 34:5

Look at the verb. It is about where the eyes go.

And notice what it is not. It does not say those who have never looked at the wrong thing are radiant. It does not say those who have got it under control, or those who have gone a hundred days, or those who have told someone. It says those who look to Him. That is a present movement of the eyes, available at twenty to two in the morning and available at half past eight the next day, and it is not scored against your record.

Now something about the psalm this line sits in, because it matters more than it looks.

The heading on Psalm 34 says it belongs to a moment when David pretended to be out of his mind in front of a foreign king in order to get out of the room alive. Scratching at doors, letting spit run down his beard. It is not a heroic story. It is an embarrassing one, and it is preserved, right there over the top of a song about faces not being ashamed.

I find that quietly persuasive, and I am not going to argue it with you, I am just going to leave it where you can see it. People building a hero do not keep the humiliating bit. This book keeps it. And the man who wrote the line about faces was writing it from inside a memory he would rather not have had.

So here is what shame does, and then here is what God does, and they are not the same movement at all.

Shame turns the eyes down and then it turns them inward. It says look at what you are. And once you are looking at yourself, you are looking at the one thing in the room that cannot help you. That is why it is so effective and why it repeats. The looking away from God and the going back to the screen are not two problems. They are the same circle, and shame is what keeps the circle turning, because a person who feels unfit to come near God will go back to the thing that at least does not require him to be fit.

God does the opposite thing. He lifts the face.

There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not less condemnation, not condemnation deferred until you have proved something. None. And that is not a sentence about your performance, it is a sentence about your location. In Christ. That is where you are standing right now, this morning, with last night still in your head.

And this is the point where somebody usually tells you to go and confess it to a human being. I am not going to. Not because there is no place for that, but because you do not owe anyone in your life a report on this in order to be clean, and a requirement like that put on a person in your condition becomes one more reason to stay in the bathroom. If, in time, you want to say it to one safe person, that can be a good and freeing thing and you will know. It is not the price of this. Nothing is the price of this.

You have one thing to do this morning, and it is a movement of the eyes.