Measuring Twenty Years Against a Fortnight

It was fourteen days in a hall with a broken radiator and Dan can still tell you the smell of it.

He was nineteen. It was not organized. Somebody stayed behind after a Thursday and then more people stayed behind on the Friday, and by the second week there were people in there at one in the morning and nobody could really explain it, and a man Dan had never spoken to told him something about himself that nobody living knew.

Two of the people in that hall are still following God thirty years later. One of them is a doctor in another country. Two of them are not, and one of those is dead, and Dan thinks about him more than he expected to at this age.

Fourteen days. Then it stopped, in the way those things do, without an announcement.

He is thirty-nine now and he has been in church every week of the twenty years since, apart from a bad stretch in his late twenties. He leads something. People rely on him. If you asked anybody who knows him they would say he is one of the steadiest men in that building.

And there is a private ruler he has been holding the entire time.

Every year gets measured against those fourteen days. Every good service. Every time something genuinely moves in a room. He has a moment, somewhere in the middle of it, where a quiet voice says this is not that, and it is always right, and it always takes something out of the room for him even when the room is good.

He has never told anyone about the ruler. He suspects some of them have one.

And this year it turned into something worse, which is why he is sitting up. Because at some point in the spring he noticed that he was not really expecting anything from God any more. Not disbelieving. Just not expecting, in the way a man stops expecting snow after living somewhere warm long enough.

And he traced it back and it is the ruler. Twenty years of holding a fortnight up against every ordinary week has slowly taught him that ordinary weeks are what happens when God is not doing anything.

Which is not what he believes. It is just what he has practiced.

And you may have a fortnight of your own, or a summer, or one year in your twenties, and you may have been quietly scoring everything against it ever since.

There is a question Scripture tells you not to ask, and it is that one

Take this off before anything else, because you have carried it for twenty years and it was never yours.

You are not living in the aftermath of the real thing. You never were. Scripture names the comparison you have been running and calls it unwise rather than sensitive, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the intensity of a room, who decides where and when He moves. Set the ruler down here. It is heavy and it has been taking something out of every good service you have sat in.

Now hear the sentence, because it is remarkably blunt and it is aimed at exactly this.

Do not say, "Why were the old days better than these?" For it is not wise to ask such questions.Ecclesiastes 7:10

That is not a rebuke about nostalgia in general. It is specific. It names a question, and it says do not ask it, and it gives a reason: it is not wise.

And the reason it is not wise is that the question cannot be answered honestly. You cannot compare a fortnight you were nineteen inside with a Tuesday you are thirty-nine outside. The first one has been edited by two decades of memory, and it has all the boredom taken out of it, and you were a different person with different nerves in a different body. Scripture knows that, which is why His Spirit had that sentence written down for men of thirty-nine.

You are not being asked to forget it. Nobody is asking you to say it was not real. It was real. Two people are still walking with God from it.

You are being asked to stop weighing with it, which is a completely different thing, and it is His word that asks it and His Spirit who makes it possible.

You are able to put it down. Right now, this evening. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who moves as He chooses, and He has never once been required to repeat Himself in order to be present.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches either side.

Nothing here says God does not do what He did in that hall. He does. He has in every generation, and He may in yours, and wanting it is not immaturity.

And nothing here promises you a second fortnight. I cannot promise that and I will not try. It is not on offer as a reward for a better attitude, and its absence for twenty years is not a verdict on you or on your church or on anybody's prayers. Nobody arranged the first one either. You were nineteen and you stayed behind after a Thursday, and His Spirit did what His word says He does, which is move where He chooses.

Here is the tender part. The ruler has not kept the memory alive. It has been quietly killing your expectation, which is the exact opposite of what you have been using it for.

You picked it up because you wanted more of God, and twenty years later it is the main reason you have stopped looking for Him on a Sunday. Scripture calls that question unwise for exactly this outcome, and His Spirit is in the ordinary room whether or not you expect Him.

Scripture calls that question unwise and His Spirit is the one who is present in an ordinary week, and neither of them ever asked you to grade a room.