Whether It Was Ever Really There

Frank unlocks the side door at half past nine on Wednesdays, props it with the brick that lives behind the drainpipe, and then sits down on the step, because for the first twenty minutes the inside of a stone church is colder than the outside of one and there is no sense being a hero about it.

He has the thermos. There are crocuses in the rough grass along the wall, the purple ones, three of them out and the rest still deciding. Somewhere behind him the heating pipes start their knocking.

He has sat on that step and prayed for eleven years. That is not a boast and he would be embarrassed to hear it said out loud. It is just what happens when a man has a key and arrives twenty minutes early.

Since somewhere around the start of February, there has been nothing there.

Not anger. Not grief. Not a crisis, which he could at least have named and taken to somebody. Flat. He says the same words in the same order and they go out of him with no weight on them at all, like mailing a letter into a wall, and he sits there afterward with his hands around the cup and there is nobody at the other end of it that he can feel.

He has not told anyone. He is not sure what he would even say. Everything in his life is fine. That is part of what makes it hard to raise.

And in the last week or two a new thought has started coming, and this is the one that has actually frightened him.

What if none of it was ever there.

What if the eleven years of warmth on this step was simply the kind of man he happens to be. A steady temperament. A liking for old buildings and early mornings. A habit that ran on its own momentum and has now run out, the way habits do, and the whole thing was weather and he mistook it for God.

At about a quarter to ten the two women who set out the chairs come up the path arguing cheerfully about the cups, and he stands up and takes the box off Margaret, and they go in.

He does not know that the pipes started knocking early because somebody put the heating on a timer four years ago after watching him sit out in the cold, and never mentioned it.

Who started it

Paul is writing from a prison, to a church he loves, and he says a thing about them that he has no business being confident about, and then he tells them exactly why he is confident.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Go through the verbs and see who is doing them. He which hath begun. He will perform. Both of them belong to God. There is not one action in that sentence assigned to the Philippians, and Paul is not being careless: he is a man who could write a demanding letter when he wanted to, and here he deliberately does not.

Which means the good work in you was never running on you.

You are held by the One who began it, and you were held on every single morning in February. I am not saying that to talk you out of how flat it feels. Philippians 1:6 is written down, it puts the beginning and the carrying in the same pair of hands, and the Spirit is what makes an old prison letter land on a man sitting on a cold step with a thermos.

Now think about what a flat season actually proves, because a flat season is very loud and it makes claims about itself.

It proves that the feeling has gone. That is the whole of its evidence. It cannot speak to what God has done, because it was not in the room when He did it, and it has no access to the record.

You have not lost the thing, and you were never the one holding it in the first place. Second Timothy 1:12 has Paul saying he is persuaded that God is able to keep what has been committed to Him, and the written word puts the keeping on the right side of the transaction. What the Spirit adds is that the arrangement has not changed because the season has.

The feeling was never the fuel

Here is a small confusion that has done an enormous amount of damage to good people.

We learned to read the warmth as the meter. When the warmth is up, the supply is good. When the warmth goes, something has gone wrong, and probably in you. So an empty spring gets read as a fault, and the person starts looking for the leak in themselves, and finds nothing, and starts to wonder about the whole eleven years.

But warmth is a report on the room. It is not a report on the source. A person can be genuinely full and feel nothing, the way a person can be genuinely warm in a house and stop noticing the heating exists, and neither of those tells you anything at all about the boiler.

Look at Elijah after the mountain. He has just seen fire come down in front of a whole nation, and a few days later he is sitting under a tree in a desert asking to die. And what God does first is not a rebuke and not a sermon. He lets him sleep. Then He feeds him. Then He lets him sleep again. The word does not treat the emptiness as a disgrace and it does not hurry him out of it.

You are not failing, and you were not failing on any of the mornings that felt like mailing a letter into a wall. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and it is written in that plain a register on purpose. The Spirit is not standing over a tired man in February waiting for better output.

I am not going to tell you when the warmth comes back. Nobody honest can tell you that, and anybody who puts a date on it is selling you something. What I can tell you is who is doing the keeping while you wait, and that is a different question and a better one.

You have oil you did not press, and it is not running low because your Wednesday went quiet. Romans 5:5 says the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us, and the written word makes the Spirit the one who pours and you the one poured into. Not the other way around, and never once the other way around.