I Was Not Born When It Happened

She has heard about that room perhaps three hundred times, and she has never been in it, because it stopped being that room four years before she was born.

They are not boring about it. That is worth saying. They do not go on. It comes up the way a good year comes up in a family, in passing, with a small change in the voice, and then the conversation moves on.

But it is there. Underneath everything in that building there is a period of about three years that everybody over fifty was inside and nobody under thirty has any access to, and she has spent her whole life living in its afterward.

She is twenty four. She loves God, she is not disillusioned, and she has begun to ask for it, and the asking is where the trouble is.

Because she does not know what she is asking for. She has only the descriptions, and the descriptions are somebody else's, and when she asks she feels like a woman requesting a thing from a catalogue she found in her mother's house. She cannot tell whether she wants God or wants to have been there.

If everything you have heard about happened before you existed, come and pick up some chairs. Nobody who was in that room is going to be criticized here.

Inherited longing is not secondhand longing

Let us deal with the suspicion she has of her own asking, because it is the thing stopping her and it is not sound.

Her argument is that a longing she got from other people's stories is not really hers. She did not generate it, she absorbed it, and absorbed things feel like borrowed things.

But that is how almost everything true reaches a person. Nobody generates their own hunger for anything out of nothing. It is provoked, by a description, by somebody's face when they talk, by a room that has an unmistakable afterward in it. She did not manufacture the appetite, and that has never been what made an appetite real.

You are not asking for a memory. Nothing about a longing you inherited has ever made it less genuinely yours. I am not saying it to encourage a young woman. Scripture says it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy (Joel 2:28), which places the sons and daughters in it by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman putting out chairs.

The promise names the next generation specifically

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who was in that room.

Read who is listed, because the list is not general and the inclusion is deliberate.

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.Joel 2:28

Your sons and your daughters. That is the generation belonging to the people being addressed, not the people themselves, and they are named before the old men and the young men are named.

Which is to say: the ones who come after are not an afterthought in that verse. They are the first group listed, and they are described as receiving rather than as inheriting an account of what their parents received.

You are named in the promise rather than standing outside it, and Scripture lists the sons and daughters first. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman of twenty four in a hall on a Tuesday.

Nobody who was there is being criticized

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about older people who talk too much about the past.

They do not. They are careful about it, and the ones who were in that room have mostly held their tongues out of exactly the fear that they would become the generation who never stopped mentioning it. Their small change of voice is not indulgence. It is a memory of something real that happened to them.

And nothing here suggests she should be somewhere else. This building is where she is, and the people in it are hers, and there is not one sentence on this page nudging her toward a room with a better story in it.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says if ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking is what is named and no location and no lineage are attached, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a period she missed by four years, who is being asked for.

And if this has cost more than the people in that hall know, if sleep has gone, if the asking has started to frighten you, 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.