Deep Calls to Deep

It was the end of a long day and I’ve used up all potentially productive words before dinner, and I was driving across town in the dark to a Bible study I’d never been to.

I’d been looking for one a while now.

A women’s Bible study, specifically, something regular, something I could grow roots in and find some sort of community with. But nearly every one I found met at 9 in the morning on a weekday, which is lovely if you’re retired or stay at home and impossible if you work in a hospital. I’d started to wonder whether the church simply assumed women like me didn’t exist. Then I found one that met at night. It was far. It started late. But by that point I’d decided connection was going to cost me something, time or energy or sleep, and I was willing to pay for a chance for that to happen.

The study met in a church classroom.

Folding tables pushed together into a long rectangle, fluorescent lights, a coffee urn on a side table next to a plate of grocery-store cookies. About a dozen women sat around the table when I came in, most of them a little older than me, all of them friendly. Someone waved me to an empty chair. Someone else poured me a coffee.

And then I noticed what was on the table. Every woman had the same glossy workbook open in front of her, with highlighters and pens lined up beside it. I looked around for a Bible. There wasn’t one. Not a single one, on a table full of women gathered to study it.

I had mine in my bag, but as I reached in to pull it out, I realized quickly it wasn’t included–the first ninety minutes were a video.

Someone wheeled a television to the end of the room and dimmed the lights, and for an hour and a half we watched a teacher pace a stage in front of a studio audience. I’ll be fair and say I don’t remember most of what she said. I remember a great deal about breakthrough and blessing and favor, and about how God wanted to increase us. I remember the flawless attire, the ornamental environment, the lighting and the music cues. And I remember checking the clock more often than I’d like to admit, already tired from the day, growing more irritated by the minute and not quite sure why.

When the video ended, the lights came back on and we turned to the workbook questions.

The questions themselves were fine…. mostly. But the answers drifted almost immediately. Within a few minutes, a question about forgiveness had become a conversation about a coworker who didn’t deserve it. A question about humility turned into a discussion of how proud and entitled young people are these days. Someone’s in-laws came up. Someone’s neighbor. The tone was pleasant, even warm, but nearly everything we said was about someone who wasn’t in the room.

Then came prayer requests. “Pray for my sister-in-law, she’s just so…” and then a detailed account of her failings. “Pray for my son’s girlfriend, because, well, you know.” Each request was framed as care and delivered as a report. A few drifted into politics, and the politics turned into opinions, and the opinions turned into more like a rant.

And in between, a running tally of church involvement. Who was serving on which committee, who was volunteering for the fall festival, who’d been at the church three nights that week. It was said with a kind of pride, as if the number of hours were the measure of how close you were to God.

What never came up, not once in two and a half hours, was anyone’s own relationship with Him.

No one said, “I’ve been struggling to pray.” No one said, “I’ve been angry with God this month.” No one confessed anything, or wondered anything aloud, or admitted they didn’t understand something. Myself included.

I drove home in the dark feeling vaguely uneasy but I couldn’t have told you why. It took me years.

Luke describes the first believers after Pentecost this way: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The apostles’ teaching came first. Not a teacher’s product. The word of those who had walked with Jesus, which became the New Testament we hold. And when Paul later preached in Berea, the people there were commended because “they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). They checked even Paul against God’s Word.

On that night, nobody could have checked anything. There was nothing on the table to check it against.

After the exiles rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall, the people gathered in the square and asked Ezra to bring out the Book of the Law. He read it “from early morning until midday,” and “the ears of all the people were attentive” (Nehemiah 8:3). When he opened it, they all stood up. The Levites moved among the crowd and “read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (8:8).

And the people wept (8:9).

They wept because they heard God’s Word and saw themselves in it. The Word was in the middle of the gathering, and it did what it always does when it’s allowed to speak…..it reached them.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone weep over a workbook.

Paul wrote of people “imagining that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Timothy 6:5), and later warned that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3).

I don’t want to be unkind to the women around that table–they are my sisters in Christ. I also suspect most of them were sincere, and I don’t know the teacher’s heart. But a message built around God increasing our blessings is a message that keeps our attention on ourselves and what we’re going to receive. It scratches an itch. It rarely asks anything hard.

Prayer that’s really about other people has a long history.

Jesus told a story about two men who went up to the temple to pray. The Pharisee “standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector'” (Luke 18:11). His prayer was entirely about other people. Their sins, their failures, how he compared.

The tax collector, meanwhile, “standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'” (18:13). His prayer was entirely about himself and God. And Jesus said he was the one who went home justified.

Proverbs is blunt about prayer requests that carry too much detail: “Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered” (Proverbs 11:13). I’m not sure anyone at that table meant to slander anyone. But a great many secrets were revealed that night, and very few of them belonged to the people revealing them.

James gives the alternative. “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). Your sins. The healing in that verse comes from being honest about yourself, not from being informed about someone else.

The volunteering aspect though puzzled me most.

I love the church. I believe in serving it. But there was something about the way hours were counted around that table, as if busyness were holiness, that reminded me of a line Jesus quoted from Isaiah: “this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men” (Isaiah 29:13).

It’s possible to be at the church every night of the week and still never speak to God about anything that matters. I know, because I’ve done it. Activity can be a way of drawing near, and it can also be a way of keeping Him at a polite distance while looking very devoted.

So why did it take me years to understand what was wrong?

I think it’s because I didn’t have a picture of the alternative yet. I’d never been in a room where women opened their Bibles and then opened their lives. Where someone said, “I don’t know how to forgive my mother,” and the others didn’t rush to fix it but sat with her in it. Where prayer requests ended up being confessions instead of something to report.

When I finally found something closer to that, years later, I recognized what had been missing that night. The psalmist says, “Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls” (Psalm 42:7). Depth answers depth. If no one around the table goes below the surface, no one else can either. We’d all stayed in the shallows together, talking about everyone who wasn’t there, and that’s why I left feeling full and empty at the same time.

It would be very easy, though, now that I’m reading back over all this, to sound like the Pharisee in the temple.

God, I thank you that I am not like those women. And that would be exactly the same failure I’m describing, if I’m being honest.

I also have to admit that I didn’t speak up either. I sat there for two and a half hours and never once said anything personal about my own walk with God. I could have been the one to go first. I wasn’t. Maybe if someone had, the whole evening would have turned. I’ll never know.

I never went back to that group. But I didn’t stop looking, and I’m glad. Hebrews tells us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together” (10:24-25). One shallow evening isn’t a reason to give up on gathering. It’s a reason to look harder for, or to help build, the kind of room where deep can call to deep.

I still bring my Bible to every study I go to. Even when no one else does. Maybe especially then.