It is a quarter past two in the morning, and you are in a vinyl chair the color of oatmeal, in a hallway on the fourth floor, because the room itself has too many people in it.
Somewhere down the corridor a machine is making the sound machines make. You have been awake since five o'clock yesterday morning. The coffee in your hand went cold an hour ago and you are still holding it because setting it down would require deciding where.
The news, when it came, came in the flat voice they train them to use. And in that chair, for the first time in a long time, the question of where you stand with God has stopped being theoretical. It is not a topic anymore. It has walked up and sat down beside you, and it is asking, and you have to answer it with whatever you actually have.
So what do you have?
If everything you have is inside you, then here is what you are about to do. You are going to try to reconstruct a feeling you had at sixteen. You are going to attempt, at two in the morning, on no sleep, in a body flooded with adrenaline and grief, to determine whether a decision you made half your life ago was sincere enough to have counted. You will be running an audit, with faulty records, in the worst conditions of your life, on the one question that matters most — and the auditor will be a man who has not slept and cannot stop shaking.
Now suppose instead that what you have is this. A date. A church. A font in the corner of a building three hundred miles from here. A morning when water was put on your head in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and God attached to that water a promise to forgive your sins.
Notice what has and has not changed in the last four hours. Your feelings have changed. Your capacity to feel anything has changed. Your ability to construct a coherent thought about God has changed — you could not defend the faith to a freshman right now, and you know it.
The date has not changed. The promise attached to it has not changed. Not one word of it is different at 2:15 in the morning than it was at noon on a good Tuesday in June. Extra nos is not coldness. It is the difference between a promise you have to remember and a promise that was recorded.
Everything that lives inside you moves. Your memory revises itself constantly and
without telling you; ask any two siblings about the same Christmas and watch two honest people describe different afternoons. Your feelings are downstream of your blood sugar and your sleep and the last conversation you had, and they will report a different verdict on your soul at eleven at night than at nine in the morning, on no new evidence.
Your sense of your own sincerity is the least reliable instrument you own, because it is the only one you cannot check against anything outside itself.
God knows this. He made you, and he has been dealing with people like us for a long
time. And so, in what I have come to regard as one of the great mercies of the Christian faith, he refused to hide the gift in the one place you cannot search reliably. He put it outside, where you can go and get it. Not because he is distant, but because he is kind, and because he had no interest in a gift you could only be sure of on your good days.
The coldness objection has it exactly backwards. A religion located in your interior is
the cold one. It leaves you alone in there with your own testimony, at two in the
morning, with no witness.