The Distance With No Number

Ask her how far it is to anywhere and she will tell you, and she will be right.

Fourteen to the county seat. Two and a half to the church, or one and three quarters if you cut through the Hollands' field, which she has not done since the dog. Forty-one to her sister's, and she can tell you what that is in gas and in minutes and which stretch of it you lose the radio on. Reba has lived in one valley her whole life and she carries it in her head the way other people carry a phone number, and if you tell her a thing is a long way off, she will ask you how far, and she will not be satisfied until there is a figure.

That habit has served her well for sixty years, in everything except one.

Because there is a thing she did, a long time ago now, and she has heard all her life that God takes sins away. She believes it. She has said it to other people, on porches, holding their hands, and meant every word.

But she needs to know how far.

That is the honest shape of it. When she prays about her own, the question that comes up is not did He, it is how far did He take it, and there is never an answer, and a woman who thinks in miles cannot rest on a thing with no figure on it. So it comes back. It comes back at the sink and it comes back at four in the morning and it comes back on the drive to her sister's on the stretch where you lose the radio, and every time, she asks how far, and gets nothing, and puts it down again.

If you are like that, you are not faithless. You are practical. And I want to show you that the psalm which answers this was written by somebody who understood exactly the kind of person you are, and who picked his direction on purpose.

Why he did not say north and south

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

Now, a person could read that quickly and hear only poetry. Reba would. She would hear it as a nice way of saying a long way, and a long way is not a figure, and she would be back at the sink by Tuesday.

So look at what the psalmist actually did, because it is precise, and it is engineering rather than decoration.

He had four directions to choose from and he chose the only pair that has no distance between them.

North and south have ends. There is a north pole and there is a south pole, and the distance between them is a number, and you can go north until you cannot go any further and then every step is south. It is finite and it is measurable and if he had written north and south, then a woman like Reba could get a figure, and the figure would be large, and it would be a figure.

East and west never meet and never end. Go east and you keep going east forever; there is no point where east becomes west. It is the one direction pair in creation that has no maximum.

He chose the immeasurable one deliberately, and he chose it for the very woman who needs a number.

You are asking for a figure and you have been handed something better, and it is already removed, and the removal was measured in the one unit that has no ceiling. I am not making a lot of a small thing. It is written in Psalm 103:12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a piece of careful geography into a psalm so that a practical woman would have something she could actually lean on.

Removed, and who did the removing

There is a second thing in that verse that gets read past, and for Reba it matters as much as the direction.

So far hath He removed our transgressions from us.

He removed them. Not: they drifted. Not: they will fade if you stop thinking about them, which is the advice she has been given twice by well-meaning people and which has never once worked, because a thing does not stop being true by being ignored.

There was an act. Somebody did something. And the distance in the verse is not the distance the sin traveled on its own; it is how far it was carried by the one who carried it.

You have transgressions that were carried off by God Himself, and it is already done, and the carrying was His act and not a slow fading on your part. Scripture says He has removed our transgressions from us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old verb like removed land on a woman who has been trying to forget her way to peace.

What a woman who thinks in miles can hold

And here is the practical form of it, which is what she actually needs.

She does not need to visualize infinity; nobody can. What she needs is one sentence she can say at the sink, and it is this: there is no drive I can make that gets me back to it.

That is what east and west means for a woman with a car and a map in her head. Not a mystical idea. A road that does not exist. However far she goes in that direction, she does not arrive. The trip cannot be made, because the distance has no other end.

You are living at a distance that has no road back across it, and it is already the distance He set. It is written that as far as the east is from the west so far has He removed our transgressions from us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a fact of geography operate as rest in a woman standing at a sink.