A Settled Certainty At The Sink

She was doing the washing up and thinking about nothing in particular.

That is the whole setting, and she is aware of how unpromising it sounds. No meeting. No music. Nobody laying hands on anybody. A Tuesday, about half past eight in the evening, with a saucepan in her hands and the radio off because the batteries had gone.

And something settled on her that she has not been able to shift since, and would not want to.

Not a feeling exactly, although there was warmth in it. Closer to a certainty: about God, about being His, about a specific thing she had been frightened of for two years, which stopped frightening her that evening and has not started again.

Here is why she has never counted it. Every single account she was ever given of this involved weeping. That was the picture: a room, and somebody undone, and tears, and afterward people saying it was unmistakable. She has seen it happen twice and both times it was real and moving and she is not going to say a word against it.

Hers had no tears in it at all. So for four years she has held a genuine thing at a distance, on the grounds that it did not match the photograph.

If yours did not look like the ones you were shown, sit down and have some coffee. Nobody's experience is going to be ranked on this page.

The photograph was one photograph

Let us look at where the picture came from, because it is doing more work than anybody intended.

She was shown a particular kind of moment twice, described warmly, by people who loved her. Two instances. And a mind that has two instances and no third will treat those two as the pattern, because that is what minds do with small samples.

Nobody set out to hand her a template. It assembled itself out of what she happened to have seen.

You are not holding a substandard version of anything. What came at the sink came from God, and the shape it took was His choice rather than a shortfall in yours. I am not saying that to be reassuring. The written word says all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will (1 Corinthians 12:11), where severally means one at a time and individually, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a kitchen at half past eight on a Tuesday.

The verse that expects variety

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an argument against tears.

Read the chapter around that verse, because Paul is dealing with exactly this and he is dealing with it in a congregation that had already started ranking.

But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.1 Corinthians 12:11

One Spirit. Many different outcomes. And the deciding clause is as he will, which puts the choosing of the form entirely on the Giver's side and leaves nobody any grounds for a league table.

The whole passage is built to stop people doing what has been done to you. It exists because a room had begun to treat one kind of evidence as the standard, and the answer given was not that they had picked the wrong standard. It was that there was never going to be one.

You are inside that verse, and Scripture makes the variety deliberate rather than accidental. That is written into the clause itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a woman with a saucepan in her hands.

Nothing here says quiet is better

Something must be said very plainly, or this page becomes the same problem facing the other way.

The two occasions you watched were real. The weeping was not performance and it was not excess, and the people it happened to were not doing something more theatrical than what happened to you. This article has no interest in promoting your kitchen over their room.

The claim is not that yours was better. It is that yours was yours.

You have something to count, and counting it takes nothing away from anybody who was given something else. Scripture says now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4), where the diversity is stated first and approvingly, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a comparison, who decides what arrives and how.

And if these four years have cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.