I Used To See Things

The house she grew up in had things happen in it, and she does not know how to say that to most people without watching their face change.

Not spectacles. Nobody was theatrical. But her mother would say a thing on a Tuesday and it would happen on a Thursday, plainly, in front of everybody, four or five times a year for the whole of her childhood. A woman came to that house once about a pain and left without it. There was a season when her father knew things he had no way of knowing and everybody in that family treated it as ordinary because in that family it was.

She is forty six.

She has seen nothing she could honestly call a sign in four years.

She wants to be exact, because she is exact. Good things have happened. Prayers have been answered in the way prayers are usually answered, which is slowly and afterwards. She is not saying nothing has happened. She is saying that the specific kind of thing she grew up with, the Tuesday to Thursday kind, has not happened in four years.

Here is what she has been doing since about the second year, and it goes on at a low level constantly.

She has been searching herself. Not dramatically. She is not sitting up at night in torment. She is auditing: is there something I have let in, or let go, or stopped doing. Did something close. Was there a point.

She has been through her whole life about nine times looking for the fault, and she has found four or five things, all of them small and none of them convincing, and she has repented of every one of them thoroughly and nothing has changed.

At the tea table last month somebody said, about somebody else entirely, that God moves where there is faith.

She agreed. She has said it herself. And she carried it home like a stone in a shoe.

He lists every absence out loud, and then says yet

Sit down at that table a minute, because there is a passage at the end of Habakkuk where a man makes a list, and the list is the most honest thing in the prophets.

He does not spiritualize anything. He names it.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17

Six absences, itemized, out loud, one after another.

He does not say the fig tree is blossoming in a spiritual sense. He does not say the vines are fine really. He says there is nothing there, six times, in the plainest agricultural language available, and nowhere in the passage does anybody suggest that the barrenness is his fault.

And then: yet.

Hear this at your own tea table. You are not the reason, and the written word is what settles it, not comfort. Scripture has a prophet naming total absence without once diagnosing himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that list in the record so that people in a four year silence would have language for it.

Now let me deal with the sentence you carried home, because it was said about somebody else and it landed on you.

God moves where there is faith. That is a true sentence and it can be turned into a cruel one in about four seconds, and the turn happens when you run it backwards.

Forwards it says something about God. Backwards it says: where God has not visibly moved, faith was missing. And that is not in the written word anywhere, and the whole book of Habakkuk is a man with faith standing in a field with nothing in it.

Hear this too, and let it stop the audit. You are not the fault, and Scripture is what says so. What is written never once makes the absence of a sign into evidence about the person waiting, and the Spirit of God does not withdraw manifestation as a punishment, and nine passes through your own life have found nothing convincing because there is nothing there to find.

And now the thing about your mother's house, which I want to put carefully because it is precious.

What happened in that house was real. Nobody here is explaining it away, and the woman who left without the pain left without it, and your father knew things.

And it was a gift, given in a season, to a family. It was never a standard, and it was never a rate. Nothing in the written word makes weekly manifestation the baseline against which a life is measured, and your mother would be the first to say so, and probably did.

You grew up with an unusual season and you have measured four ordinary years against it and found the four years wanting, and the Holy Spirit has never used that measure and no written word supplies it.