I Have Never Seen One And I Do Not Say So

She has taught for eleven years and she is careful, and this is about the one place where the carefulness has turned into something else.

There are things in the written word that she teaches and believes and has never seen.

She wants both halves of that sentence held. She believes them. She is not a woman quietly teaching what she doubts, and if you sat her down she would defend every one of them from the text and do it well.

She has just never been in the room when one happened.

And over eleven years she has developed a way of phrasing it. She does not lie. She has never once said a thing that was not true. But there is a set of constructions she reaches for automatically, and they are things like: and we see this again and again. And: this is the kind of thing God does among His people.

Both true. Neither one of them says: I have never seen this.

In February a woman in that room, who is about twenty five and has been coming for a year, asked her afterwards, in the ordinary way of a person clearing up chairs: have you ever actually seen that happen?

And she said: I have known of it.

Which is true. And which is not what she was asked.

She has thought about it since roughly every week. Not because she lied, because she did not. Because a young woman asked her a real question and got a construction back, and the construction was eleven years old and she deployed it without deciding to.

Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed

Sit down with the chairs half stacked, because there is a sentence at the end of John spoken directly over people in your exact position, and it is a blessing rather than a concession.

Thomas has just seen. He has been given the evidence he asked for, specifically, and he has said my Lord and my God.

And then Jesus says something that is not aimed at Thomas at all.

Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.John 20:29

Blessed are they that have not seen.

That is a benediction, spoken forward, over everybody who would come afterwards without the evidence. It is not a consolation prize and it is not an apology for their disadvantage. He calls them blessed, and He says it in the room, in front of the man who did see, on the day it happened.

Hear this with the chairs in your hands. You are not teaching beyond your experience, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture blesses believing without seeing by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept eleven years of teaching honest in substance, so having seen nothing was never a gap in your standing.

Now let me name what the constructions cost, because they are not a lie and they are still costing something.

They cost the room the most useful thing you have, which is a woman standing under the written word's own blessing on those who have not seen, with the Holy Spirit in her teaching.

There is a woman of twenty five in that room who has also never seen one. There are probably five of them. And what they have quietly concluded, because everybody teaching them uses those constructions, is that seeing is normal and they are outside it.

You are the person best placed on earth to end that for them, and you have accidentally been reinforcing it for eleven years, one careful phrase at a time.

Hear this too, and let it come off before Thursday. You are not less qualified for having seen nothing, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts a blessing on believing without sight and never once ranks the unseeing below the seeing, and the Spirit of God has never made experience the credential for teaching what is written.

And now the young woman, because she is the reason this article exists.

She did not ask you a technical question. She asked whether the person teaching her this had ever seen it, and she asked it while clearing up chairs, which is when people ask the questions they actually have.

She was not testing you. She was checking whether she was allowed to be where she is.