My Body Is Not A Signal

Twenty years of hearing people describe something she has never had.

A check in the spirit. A settled peace about it. It just did not sit right. I had a real unease. He had complete peace, so he went.

She has listened to that language since she was nineteen, in rooms she loved, from people she trusts and who were not performing. She believes them. That is important: she has never once thought they were making it up.

She just cannot find any of it in herself.

Her body does produce sensations. It produces a great many, constantly, and most of them are about noise or sleep or the specific chair she is sitting in, and none of them correlate with anything. She has tested this. She kept a note for four months at one point, quietly, and there was no pattern.

Here is where that has left her, and it is worse than it sounds.

She has never fully trusted a decision she has made in her adult life. Not one. She makes them, and she makes them well by any external measure, and underneath every single one there is a permanent low hum: I did not get the confirmation everybody else gets, so this might be self will and I would have no way of knowing.

Twenty years of that hum.

Last month somebody at a table said, warmly, about a job: I just had such peace about it.

And she said: that is lovely.

And she went out to the car afterwards and sat there for a while.

Thine ears shall hear a word

Sit down with the blanket a minute, because there is a promise in Isaiah about guidance, and what it names is not a sensation.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.Isaiah 30:21

Thine ears shall hear a word.

A word. Something with content, that says a thing, that can be repeated. The verse even gives you the wording: this is the way, walk ye in it.

It is not a feeling in the chest. It is not a lifting or a heaviness or a check. It is speech, and speech has meaning in it, and meaning can be examined and written down and tested against Scripture, which is exactly what a sensation cannot be.

Hear this in your own front room. You are not missing the instrument, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture promises a word rather than a signal, and the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks it, and He has been guiding a woman for twenty years through a faculty she was told was the wrong one.

Now let me be careful about the people at the table, because you have been careful about them and they deserve it.

They are not making it up. Some people do get a physical accompaniment to conviction, and it is real, and it is often reliable for them and they are right to speak about it.

The mistake is not theirs and it is not yours. It is that a description became a standard. Nobody decided this. A common experience gets described often enough in one kind of room, and within a generation the description has quietly become the mechanism, and everybody without it concludes they are missing the equipment.

Hear this too, and let it get to the hum. You have not been guessing for twenty years, and Scripture is what says so. What is written promises a word to the ears rather than a sensation to the chest, and the Spirit of God has never made a bodily signal the condition of guidance, and He has never withheld anything from a woman whose nervous system reports on chairs.

And now what you have actually had the whole time, because you have had something and you have never counted it.

You know things. You can generally say, in a plain sentence, what you believe to be true and right about a situation, and you can say it before you can justify it, and when you write it down it holds up.

That is a word. It has content. It can be examined. It is repeatable, and it has been right rather more often than the record of anybody at that table, which you would know if either of you kept score, and nobody does.

You have been discounting the one faculty the written word actually names, because it did not arrive in the format you were taught to expect, and the Holy Spirit has been using it the whole twenty years.