Learning to Look Like I Had a Moment

She keeps a tissue in her left sleeve. Always. She puts it there in the car before she gets out, the way another woman checks her lipstick.

The music has been going twenty minutes past the last announcement and the front is full. It is a good church. Nobody there is faking, and she wants that said before anything else, because she has watched these women for eleven years and she knows the difference between a performance and a person who has been undone.

She goes down the aisle because staying in her seat has stopped being neutral. Somewhere around year four it turned into a statement, and the aunties began arriving at her shoulder afterwards with their heads tilted, asking, gently, whether she had ever received.

So she has learned it. That is the honest word for it, learned, the way you learn a route.

She knows to go down on one knee rather than two, because two looks staged. She knows to let her hands come up slowly and not all the way. She knows the exact right second to let somebody catch her elbow, and how long to stay down before the getting up looks like it cost her something. And she knows how to bring the tissue out of her sleeve and press it under both eyes, held there long enough that nobody in the world can check whether it came away wet.

Eleven years. Never once.

Not a flicker, not a rush, not a heat in the chest, not a word in her ear, not the thing her friend describes as being poured into from above. She has prayed for it. She has fasted for it. She stopped asking for it out loud a long time ago because the answers people give her had begun to do damage.

Tonight she gets to the back doors with her coat over her arm, and a girl of about seven detaches from a knot of children and takes hold of her sleeve, the one with the tissue in it, and looks up.

"Auntie, what does it feel like?"

And she cannot do it. Whatever else she is, she is not a woman who will lie to a child in a church doorway.

She crouches down to the girl's height, which puts her knees on the cold tile, and she says, "I don't know, baby. It has never happened to me."

The girl considers this for a second with enormous seriousness.

Then she says, "Me neither," and her whole face lets go of something, and she runs off to find her mother.

And the woman stays crouched by the doors with her coat sliding off her arm, and what has just gone through her is not despair. It is the first true sentence she has said inside that building in eleven years, and a seven year old was the only one safe enough to say it to.

You have got a tissue in your sleeve. You have got a whole choreography for a room you have never once felt, and you have never told anybody, and the loneliest part is not being counted out. It is being counted in by everybody around you on evidence you know is manufactured.

The loudest man in the book got the quiet one

I am the wrong person to be telling you this and that is exactly why you should hear it from me. I am the tambourine on the double. I am the one who wants the drawbars out and the room off the floor.

And I am going to take you to a cave.

Because there is a man in Scripture who had the single loudest day anybody has ever had. Fire out of the sky, in front of a nation, on a mountain, with everything on the line and everybody watching. If a moment counted as a receipt, that man had the receipt of the age.

And a few days later he is under a bush in the wilderness asking to die, and God brings him to a mountain and does this.

And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:11-12

Read the sentence three times if you have to, because everything hangs on it. The wind was real. God sent the wind. The earthquake was real and the fire was real and both of them came from Him. And He was in none of the three.

The man who had already had fire fall was given, on purpose, by a God who could have done anything, the quietest register there is. Nobody saw it. Nobody could have. There is no footage of a still small voice.

So take this straight off the page. You are not standing outside anything, and you were never given a smaller God than the women at the front. 1 Kings 19:12 says plainly He was not in the fire, and the Holy Spirit who spoke to a broken prophet at the mouth of a cave in a voice like nothing at all is the same Spirit at the back doors with you and your coat.

The volume is not the receipt

Here is what those verses do to the arithmetic that has been running in you for eleven years.

The visible register has been serving as the proof of the transaction. Big feeling, therefore God. No feeling, therefore either God is withholding or something in the woman is broken, and since the first one was never believable, the second has been quietly moving in.

But if the fire can be from God and God not be in it, then the size of the event was never the measure of the presence. Which cuts both ways, and I want you to hear the kind half too: those women at the front are not lying. God is genuinely in that room. He simply is not confined to the register you can see from the third row.

And this is where I have to be careful with you, because a lesser word here would tell you your moment is coming, and I will not say that. I have not been told it and it is not mine to hand you. What I can tell you is what is already true and does not depend on anything happening on a Sunday.

You have the whole of Christ, and you were given all of Him at once and not in installments graded by how you present at an altar. Scripture says every promise of God is yes in Him, and the Holy Spirit who is in you is called the earnest, the down payment, which means He is the receipt and no one issued you a lesser one.