Psalms 10:11-12 3 says, “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
I understand this passage. God has taken my sins and removed them from me and placed them so far away from me that I can’t and won’t ever see them or hear about them again. Wow. What a beautiful thought and reality this is.
When the Psalms were written, this metaphor probably was very powerful. Interestingly, in modern human life, east and west are not always very far apart, though. In fact, at my house, east and west are only a yellow line apart and that yellow line is only about a half block away from my house. The house numbers on both sides of that yellow line in the middle of the street are like mirrors of each other, growing higher and higher the farther from the middle they are. That means the house that is half a block away from the other side has the same house number as mine – the only difference is the east or west distinction. Remember this random fact, it will come around again with a bit of importance to my story in a minute.
A while back my husband and I were safely tucked into our home, it was 9:45 at night, and we were slowly making our way to bed. The TV was off and I was in the kitchen just tidying up when the doorbell rang. This is an oddity for us, especially when we weren’t expecting anyone and it was late. Karl answered the door as I stepped into the room from the kitchen. A nicely dressed, pretty young woman in a conservative dress and heels smiled and stuck out her hand to Karl. “Hi, I’m Kathy.” Karl shook her hand automatically and the woman stepped past him and came into the house. Still smiling, she walked all the way through the living room and into the dining room to where I stood. Again she put out her hand. “Hi there, I’m Kathy. What can I do for you?”
Now in my head I am thinking, This woman doesn’t have a good hold on the same reality as I do. She is confused or a little wacko and she is in my house! Just like Karl, I automatically shook hands with her and then answered, “Honey, you came here, what is it that you want?”
Her answer was random enough that it didn’t surprise me. “I want whatever you want.”
But then something happened. I looked at her carefully. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary in her eyes. She appeared in control and calm. She was business-like and confident. She was dressed nicely and was clean. I think she even smelled good. Our eyes met, and I saw some thought cross her mind and flit through her eyes. What the thought was I will never know, but she smiled again and said, “Thank you for your time, I’ll just leave now.”
With a nod to Karl, who was still kind of dumb-founded by the door, she exited the house and left. Karl watched from the porch as she got into a car parked in front of our neighbors. She turned on the light in the car and looked at something in her purse, then started the car. Still watching, Karl noted that she only drove one block – east from west…- then parked and got out.
We went to bed, shaking our heads at the strange encounter. I laid there in the dark and replayed the scene. She hadn’t seemed “crazy”. She seemed nice. I replayed what she’d said. It seemed random and incoherent to me, but… I could tell Karl was awake and thinking as well. “Do you think that maybe she had an appointment and was just at the wrong house?”
“Babe, what kind of appointment starts at 9:45 at night and begins with “What can I do for you?”” His voice was light, I think he’d already figured the puzzle out.
It took a minute, but a shocking conclusion hit me and made me gasp. “Karl, do you think she was, um, an escort?”
There in the dark, safe in my husband’s arms, the thought became clear, and at first we both giggled at the incongruity of our mutual misunderstanding. Then, after we quieted down and I could hear the soft, even breathing that told me that he’d drifted off into sleep, I became sad. If indeed the event was what we thought – a ‘soiled dove’ making a house call and arriving at the wrong address – then here was a darkness that I couldn’t shake off for a while. I considered what it would be like to knock on a door, not knowing who or what was on the other side, in order to complete a transaction of that sort. I wondered how she’d arrived at that place in her life, and I wondered if she was safe at that very moment. I ended up praying for her, and I’ve thought of her quite a bit since. I’m praying that things change for her so that her east and west become infinitely farther apart.
