The Preparation I Built Myself

It has five parts and he can tell you all of them in order, and he assembled every one himself over about fifteen years.

A psalm first, always the same one. Then a period of silence, timed, roughly four minutes. Then confession, which has its own internal order. Then thanksgiving, which he keeps deliberately specific rather than general. And then, at last, whatever he actually came to say.

It is not superstition. He would push back hard on that. Every element is defensible and he could give you the reasoning for each, and the sequence has genuinely served him and he has taught parts of it to other people who found it useful.

Here is what he noticed last winter, and it has not left him. On a night when he cannot do the sequence, he does not pray at all.

Not because he refuses. Because he cannot find the door without the corridor. Fifteen years of building an approach has slowly made the approach the only way in, and something that began as devotion has quietly become architecture.

If you have built one of these, come and sit at this table. Not one element of your sequence is being criticized here.

Good materials, wrong load

Let us be precise about what went wrong, because it is not the parts and a man who thinks it is the parts will simply build a better set.

Every element is sound. A psalm is a good thing to begin with, silence is good, ordered confession is good, specific thanksgiving is very good. Nothing on that list is a mistake.

What happened is that the structure took a load it was never designed to bear. It began as a path and it became a precondition, and the tell is exactly what he noticed: when it cannot be completed, the whole thing fails closed.

Anything that fails closed is a gate, whatever it was built as.

You are not required to approach by a route. Nothing you designed has ever been what admits you, and no incomplete sequence has ever shut a door. I am not saying it to loosen anything. The written word says by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us (Hebrews 10:20), where the way is described as already made by somebody else entirely, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that hold at a lamplit table in the fifteenth year.

What tore, and in which direction

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a shorter sequence.

At the moment Jesus died, the historian records a detail about a piece of fabric, and includes the direction of the tear, which is not the sort of thing anybody adds by accident.

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.Matthew 27:51

From the top to the bottom. That curtain was enormous and heavy and it existed for one purpose: to regulate approach. It was the architecture of access, and there were rules about who and when and how and with what.

And it came apart downward, which is the direction a thing tears when the hands doing it are not standing on the floor.

Nobody built a better corridor. The corridor was removed by somebody above it.

You are approaching through something that was opened from the other side, and the Word records the direction of the tear on purpose. That is written into the phrase itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a man who has been maintaining an approach for fifteen years.

Keep the psalm and keep the silence

Something has to be said clearly, because a precise man will now dismantle the whole thing to prove he can, and that would be a loss.

Keep it. The psalm is good and the four minutes are good and the ordered confession has shaped you. None of it needs to go.

What changes is only its status: from the way in, to a thing you do inside a room you are already standing in.

You have a position rather than a procedure, and every element of your sequence can stay exactly where it is once it is no longer holding the door. Scripture says let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith (Hebrews 10:22), where the assurance is full at the outset rather than assembled on the way, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who has been in that room through fifteen years of a good man building a corridor.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.