Somewhere Else This Decade

Cheryl said it out loud in her own car and then sat very still, because she had not meant to say it and it had come out fully formed.

He is not working here this decade.

That was July. It was after a Sunday morning that had been perfectly fine. Nothing bad had happened. There had been a good song and a decent word and somebody had prayed for her friend's knee, and Cheryl had driven out of the car park and stopped at the exit for traffic and the sentence arrived.

She has been carrying the shape of it much longer than that. Probably twelve years.

It runs like this. God is doing something, obviously. He is always doing something. And there are places where it is visible, and there are decades where it is visible, and she has arrived at the settled private opinion that she is living in a quiet one, in a quiet town, and that her whole adult ministry has fallen into a gap between two moves.

She would never say that from a platform. She teaches, and what she teaches is faithful and it is true and it is not this.

But it runs underneath everything and it explains a lot about her.

It explains why she has stopped expecting anybody to be converted. Not stopped believing in it. Stopped expecting it, which is different and much quieter and shows up mostly in what she does not bother to say.

It explains the small flatness that comes over her in the car park after every service, which she has diagnosed for years as tiredness and which is not tiredness.

And it explains something she has never told anybody, which is that when she hears of something happening elsewhere, her very first feeling, for about four seconds before the good and generous feelings arrive, is a kind of grief.

She is fifty-one. She has been doing this since she was twenty-six.

And in July she said it out loud in a car at a junction, and then she drove home and did not tell anybody, and it has been sitting in the middle of her ever since.

And you may have a version of that sentence. It may be about a decade, or a town, or a church, or a family, and you may never have said it out loud either.

The psalm asks a question, and His Spirit is the answer to it

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it twelve years and it was never yours.

You are not living in a gap. You never were. Scripture has a whole psalm about the impossibility of getting anywhere God is not, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the visibility of a move, who is the actual measure of where He is. Set that sentence down here in the car park. It is heavy, and it has been driving you home from every service for over a decade.

Now hear the question, and notice that it is a question with no available answer.

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?Psalm 139:7

He asks it and then he tries. Heaven, and God is there. The depths, and God is there. The far side of the sea, the wings of the morning, the darkness. He goes looking for a location outside the reach of God and he cannot construct one even hypothetically.

Now put your town in that list.

Put your decade in it. Put a perfectly fine Sunday morning and a car park and a woman at a junction in it.

You cannot get to a place He is not. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who fills every one of those places, and He has never once been located by whether anybody could see Him working.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches on both sides.

Nothing here says the visible thing is not real, or that you should be content without ever seeing God move. He does move visibly, He has in every century, and the ache in you when you hear of it is not envy. It is appetite, and appetite is right, and Scripture never once shames it.

And nothing here promises you a decade of your own. I cannot promise that. Nobody arranges it, nobody earns it, and twelve quiet years are not a verdict on you or your town or your twenty-five years of teaching. It is not on offer as a reward for a better attitude, and His Spirit moves as He chooses.

Here is the tender part, and I say it as somebody who has said your sentence in a car too. The four seconds of grief are not sin.

You have been quietly ashamed of them for years, and they are not shameful. They are what a hungry woman feels when somebody else is handed bread. Scripture is entirely unembarrassed about hunger, and His Spirit is the one who put it in you in the first place, and you have been treating the best thing in you as the worst.