A Dry Year in a Faithful House

Hollis Renner had lit the stove at Sandy Fork every Sunday for forty years, and he had never once thought of it as a ministry.

The stove was a Warm Morning in the corner by the back door, and if a man did not get to it by half past seven in January the room would not come around before the singing was over. So Hollis got there at seven. Newspaper, kindling out of the shed, four lumps of coal laid on like you would set a table, and then the long wait with the door cracked while it caught. He liked the sound of the church empty. He liked the tick of the pipe as it warmed. His father had done it before him and had not made a speech about it either.

He taught the Wednesday class as well, for the same forty years, twenty-some people around a table in the back room, and if you had asked anybody at Sandy Fork who at that church knew the most about the faithfulness of God, they would have said Hollis without pausing to think. He had a way of laying a promise out flat where a person could see the whole of it. He had walked half that congregation through a funeral. He had prayed over the same nine names every morning since Carter was president.

Then, somewhere in his seventy-fourth year, it all went quiet.

Not doubt. He wants that understood. He never once decided that God was not there. It was more like the difference between a stove that is out and a stove that is warm but not burning: he went through the same motions and got nothing back off them. He read and the words lay flat. He prayed and it was like talking in an empty house. He taught on a Wednesday out of forty years of savings and drove home and sat in the truck in his own driveway for twenty minutes, and he could not have told you why.

He did not tell anyone. What would he say. He was the one people came to about this.

The dry stretch ran into the winter. And on the second Sunday in January, Hollis, who had not been late in four decades, slept through his alarm.

He came up the hill at twenty past eight with his coat half on, and he was not thinking about God at all. He was thinking that the room would be cold, and that people would be sitting in it in their coats, and that after forty years the one thing he actually did for that church he had failed to do on the coldest morning of the year.

He came through the door and the heat hit him in the face.

The stove was roaring. Somebody had laid it and lit it and cracked the door exactly the way he did it, and the pipe was ticking, and Delbert Wicks, who was twenty-six and had sat in that Wednesday class since he was eleven, was sitting on the bench beside it with his hat off, waiting to see the old man's face.

Hollis stood there in his half-on coat in a warm room he had not warmed.

And that is where it broke. Not at the table, not over the open book, not in any of the places he had spent forty years expecting God to show up. Standing in a doorway on a January morning, seventy-four years old, ambushed by a warm room.

The room was never warm because of you

Let me say the thing you keep circling, because it has not been sayable to anybody this year and it needs saying out loud by somebody who is not frightened of it.

You think the dryness is the audit. Forty years of teaching, and one year with nothing coming back off it, and somewhere down at the bottom of you a sentence has formed: then it must have been me all along. If it were really Him, it would not have gone quiet. So the forty years were performance, and the performance has finally run out of fuel, and the dryness is not a season. It is the truth showing up late.

That is a serious accusation and it deserves a serious answer, so we will go and get one.

For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.2 Corinthians 1:20

Look at where the Amen is. Paul is not saying that God's promises are reliable when you can feel them. He is saying the yes was said in Christ and the amen is said in Christ, which means both ends of the transaction have already been handled somewhere other than your chest.

You are held inside a promise whose yes and whose amen were both spoken before you ever laid a fire. That is what 2 Corinthians 1:20 says in plain words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse a man has taught a hundred times and finally lands it on the man himself, which is one of His particular kindnesses to teachers. The warmth in that room was never manufactured by the one holding the match.

What forty years actually was

Now hear the other half, and hear it warmly, because I will not sell you a comfort that costs you your calling.

Those forty years were not nothing. Delbert knew how to lay that fire because he had watched Hollis lay it since he was eleven years old. The nine names prayed over every morning were nine real people. Faithfulness is not made irrelevant by the discovery that it was never the engine. It was never supposed to be the engine. It was the obedience, and obedience is a beautiful thing, and it stays.

What changes is what it was carrying. You have been quietly acting as the boiler for a house God built, and the exhaustion in your bones this year is the exhaustion of a man doing a job that was never his. Scripture never once handed that job to you, and the Holy Spirit has not been standing back waiting for your furnace to catch.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.Isaiah 42:3

That is written about you this year, and it is worth stopping on. Smoking flax is a wick that has gone out and is still trailing smoke, no flame on it, still warm. It is the picture of exactly where you have been since spring. And what Scripture says He does with it is not relight it as a test of whether it deserves relighting; He simply refuses to snuff it. His Spirit is guarding a wick that is not currently burning, and He has been doing it every one of these quiet months while you assumed the silence was a grade.

Kept, and not by the keeper

There is a sentence in Paul's second letter to Timothy that country preachers used to love, and it is the one I want in your hands before you go anywhere near the stove again.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Read the reason he gives. Not because He is patient with us, though He is. Not because we usually come around, though we do. Because He cannot deny Himself. His faithfulness is not a policy toward you that could be reviewed. It is a fact about Him, and He is not able to be untrue to what He is.

You were kept through this whole dry year by something that has nothing to do with how the reading felt. Scripture says He abides faithful when we do not, in 2 Timothy 2:13, and the Holy Spirit did not go anywhere in June when the words lay flat on the page; He was doing what He does, which is holding a man up from underneath while the man was busy grading himself from above.

And I want to say the thing about the dryness itself, plainly. I am not going to tell you what it is for. I do not know, and a man who has taught for forty years can smell an invented explanation from the parking lot. What I can tell you is what it is not. It is not the verdict. The room was warm before you got to the door.