The Day The Feeling Did Not Come

She could always feel it. That is the part she does not know how to say without sounding like she is boasting.

From the beginning it was simply there. She would start praying and about ninety seconds in there would be a warmth across the chest and behind the eyes, a physical thing, not imagined, and she would know she had got through. It was her whole method. Not a technique, she would never have called it that. It was just how it went.

Twelve years of that.

Then, in the middle of March, on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing wrong, she prayed and it did not come.

She was not troubled. That happens.

Wednesday, nothing. Thursday she prayed for longer and there was nothing, and she noticed she was praying for longer in order to make it come, and that noticing was the first bad moment.

It has been eight weeks.

She still prays. That is worth saying, because nobody watching would see anything different: she is in her chair at ten past seven, she has the book, she says the words. But inside it she has become an inspector. Every morning she is running a check. Is it there. No. Is it there now. No.

And underneath the check is a question she has not said out loud to a single person, because it sounds hysterical when you write it down and she is not a hysterical woman.

Have I done something.

On the eighth Sunday somebody in the row behind her sings the line about His presence being near and she has to go and stand in the corridor by the coats for a bit.

The mercies come in whether the house is awake or not

Come and stand in the corridor for a minute, because I want to hand you a sentence written by a man who was in a considerably worse eight weeks than yours and who wrote the most quoted line about mornings that anybody has ever written.

He is looking at a burnt city. He has watched everything he loved go. And in the middle of the worst poem in the Bible, he puts this.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is Thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22

New every morning. Written by a man sitting in ashes.

He is not describing a feeling. He is naming a delivery. Something arrives every morning, before he is up, whether or not he is glad, whether or not he can sense a single ounce of it, and he calls the arriving of it faithfulness rather than experience.

Hear this in the corridor with your coat over your arm. You have not done something. The written word puts new mercies into a morning that a man in ashes could not feel at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying you through eight weeks in a chair at ten past seven, which is exactly what a person looks like when they are being carried.

Now let me name the thing that has actually changed, because something has, and it is not what you fear.

For twelve years you had a feeling and you used it as a gauge. That is not a sin, it is what a person naturally does with a reliable signal. But a gauge is not the tank, and for twelve years you did not need to know the difference.

You are now finding out the difference. That is not a punishment and it is not a demotion. It is what it costs to learn that the thing was never running on the warmth, and the written word never once tied it there, and the Spirit of God has not moved an inch in eight weeks.

Look at what you have actually been doing for eight weeks. You have gone to the chair with nothing coming back. Every morning. Fifty six times. In the old days you went to the chair and were paid on arrival; now you go and nothing is paid and you keep going, and the Holy Spirit has met you there every single time whether or not the meeting registered.

There is a word for that and the word is not failure. Ask anybody who has been married for forty years what the difference is between the first year and the twentieth, and none of them will tell you the twentieth felt more.

Hear this too, because the inspecting has to stop. You are not less near to God this morning than you were in February, and Scripture is what settles that, not your instruments. What is written says the compassions do not fail, and the Spirit of God is not withdrawn from a woman who cannot feel Him, and a fact that depends on my ability to detect it is not a fact, it is a reading.

And one more thing about the check itself, because it is quietly making this harder.

The moment you began asking is it there, you started standing outside your own prayer, watching it, which is the one posture in which almost nobody can feel anything. It is the same reason you cannot taste your food while describing the taste to someone. The inspecting is not neutral. It costs you the very thing it is looking for.

So we take the gauge off the wall. Not because feelings are bad. Because yours has been broken for eight weeks and you have been reading it every morning anyway, and the written word gives you a fact to stand on instead, carried by the Spirit and not by your instruments.