Deep Calleth Unto Deep in a Loud Flat

She has a picture of the sort of person who has depth with God, and she is not it.

The picture is quiet. Not necessarily rural, but unhurried. There is a chair. There is a long window and a cup of something, and time that does not have to be defended from anybody, and a general sense of interiority that her own life has never once produced.

Her life is a shared flat with four people in it, a job with rotating hours, and a phone in a group chat that has not gone quiet since 2019.

So she has categorized herself. Not bitterly. She would say she has a functional faith, which she means as a compliment to it: it works, it holds her up, and it has never been deep and she does not expect it to be, because depth is a product of calm and she has no calm.

Here is what she has never said out loud.

She reads the deep parts of the psalms the way somebody reads about a country they will not visit.

Read the whole line

There is a phrase from the forty second psalm that everybody quotes, and almost nobody quotes the second half of it.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

At the noise of thy waterspouts.

That is where the deep calls to deep. Not in the calm. Not on a still morning. At the noise, which in that image is the roar of water pouring off high ground, and it sits in the middle of a psalm about being overwhelmed, written by somebody whose whole complaint is that people keep asking him where his God is.

And the second clause is worse than the first. All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. That is a man underwater.

The deepest line in the psalter is set in the loudest and most chaotic conditions the writer can describe, and it is precisely there that one depth calls to another.

You are able to go deep in the noise, and the verse that describes depth sets it at the roar rather than the calm. That is what the word actually places it, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a woman in a shared flat.

The picture came from a photograph

Now the plain thing, and it is not about your capacity.

That image of the chair and the long window is not from Scripture. It is from photographs, and from the covers of books, and from the fact that people who write about interiority tend to be people who have some, which is not a criticism of them, it is a sampling problem.

The psalms themselves are almost entirely written by people in trouble, on the move, hunted, exiled, ill, or surrounded. Very little of the depth in that book was produced in circumstances anybody would photograph.

And nothing about your flat has ever set a ceiling on what you can know of Him. Scripture puts the deep calling at the noise of waterspouts, and the Holy Spirit is not distributing depth according to the quietness of a person's living arrangements.

Be in it without quietening it

Here is the practical piece, and it has one instruction that matters more than the rest.

Pick a recurring noisy stretch, and be with Him inside it without trying to quieten anything.

That last part is the whole exercise. Every instinct in you will be to reduce the noise first: headphones, a closed door, waiting for the flat to empty. That reduction is the picture reasserting itself, and it is why you've concluded for years that there is nowhere to do this.

Sit in the kitchen while it is full. Do not fix it. Be with Him in the middle of the actual conditions.

You are able to be with Him without improving the room, and the improving was never the door. He promised to be found by those who seek Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a full kitchen into a place where deep calls to deep.