Reading To Be Somewhere Else

You read forty pages last night and the whole time you were somewhere that is not this house.

That is what you wanted and it worked, and then you closed the book and the room came back, and the thing you noticed first was that nothing had changed while you were away.

And then a suspicion arrived, and it is the reason this page exists. The suspicion is that what you are doing is not reading. It is escape, and escape is the sort of thing a person is supposed to be careful about, and you have started being slightly careful about the one thing in this season that is still working.

Before anything else, one thing, because a person can arrive at a page about reading from anywhere. If this waiting has turned into something heavier, if you have been thinking about not being here at all, put this down and call or text 988 in the United States, or your own local crisis line wherever you are, today. This page cannot see you and is not qualified to. That call is.

Two things are also not coming here.

Nobody is handing you a list, and nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows.

What I want to look at is the suspicion, because it is running unchallenged and it has no business doing that.

Wanting to be somewhere else in a long wait is not a symptom. Scripture has a whole psalm where people say it out loud and nobody corrects them.

The Lord's song in a strange land

There is a question in Psalm 137 asked by people in exile, and the remarkable thing about it is that the psalm lets it stand.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land? (Psalm 137:4, King James Version)

Read the situation. They have been carried off. They are sitting by a river a long way from home, their instruments are hung up in the trees, and somebody has asked them for a song.

And the answer they give is a question, and the question is not rhetorical piety. It is a genuine objection: this is not the place for that, and we do not know how to do it here.

Now notice what happens next in the psalm. Nobody rebukes them. There is no verse where God corrects the sentiment or tells them to be more grateful about the river. The objection is recorded and left standing, in Scripture, permanently.

You are allowed to say that this is not the place, and wanting to be elsewhere in a long wait has never once been a fault in you. Psalm 137:4 records the objection and leaves it standing without one word of correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a room that has not changed in a year.

There is one more thing in that psalm worth having.

They remember Jerusalem constantly. The whole psalm is people whose attention is somewhere else, and that is not treated as disloyalty to the place they are in. It is treated as love for the place they belong to.

You have attention that is allowed to go elsewhere, and forty pages away has never once been the same thing as running from your own life. It is written how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land, the question is left unanswered and unrebuked in the text, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

Escape and rest are being confused

Here is the mechanism, and separating the two things is the whole of it.

Escape has a specific feature: it costs something and it hides something.

That is what makes it escape. A person escaping is avoiding a thing that needs attention, and the avoidance accumulates, and the situation gets worse in the meantime. That is the real thing and it is worth being careful about, and it is not what happens in your chair.

Because look at what those forty pages actually cost. Nothing was neglected. Nobody was waiting. The situation did not move an inch, and it would not have moved an inch if the evening had gone on staring at a wall instead.

An hour spent elsewhere in a situation that is not moving is not avoidance. There is nothing being avoided. There is only a wait, and a wait is a place, not a task.

You are resting and not escaping, and forty pages in a stalled year have never once cost anybody anything. Psalm 137:4 leaves the objection standing and never treats the exiles' attention as disloyalty, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman who has begun to suspect the one thing that is working.

And there is a second layer, and it is where the suspicion came from.

Long waits produce a strange kind of moral vigilance. With nothing to do about the actual situation, attention turns inward and starts auditing the small things: how the coping is going, whether it is being done properly, whether the good thing is really good.

That vigilance feels like honesty and it is not. It is a mind with nothing to work on, and it has picked the only available target.

You have permission to stop auditing your own evenings, and vigilance about a book has never once been the same thing as honesty. The written word records the objection without correction and lets people whose attention is elsewhere stay in the psalm, and His Spirit is the one who calls off an audit nobody ever ordered.

Fifteen minutes at a useful time

So here is the assignment, and it is smaller than the forty pages on purpose.

Read for fifteen minutes today at a time you would normally be doing something useful.

Not the evening. Not the hour that is already yours and already suspected. Take a slot in the middle of the day that had something in it, and put the book there.

Fifteen minutes. Then stop.

Here is why a useful slot and why so short.

You are allowed to say that this is not the place, and forty pages away have never once been disloyalty to the room you are standing in. The Holy Spirit is the one in that sunroom with you, and Psalm 137:4 keeps the exiles' objection standing with no correction anywhere near it.

The forty pages at night have become tangled with the suspicion, and untangling them takes a different instance rather than an argument. Fifteen minutes in the afternoon is too short to be an escape from anything and too deliberate to be an accident, and it puts reading back in the category of ordinary rather than of coping.

And nobody here is prescribing it. It is not a technique for getting through the wait and I will not pretend it is. It is a good thing, permitted in a stalled year, and it does not have to work.

You are able to read fifteen minutes in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and a good thing has never once had to justify itself as a strategy. Psalm 137:4 says how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman reading in a sunroom at three in the afternoon.

Then keep the forty pages too. Nobody is asking you to cut them down. They were never the problem and they are still the best hour of your week.

You have both hours and no case to answer about either, and a stalled year has never once turned a good evening into a fault. It is written how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land, the objection is preserved in Scripture with no rebuke attached, and the Spirit of God is saying it in a sunroom today.