I Was Waiting For A Different Version

He was nineteen when somebody described it to him, and the description was so good that it became the thing itself.

It was one man at a camp, speaking for about four minutes about what happens and what it feels like, and it went into him whole. He has been able to replay it word for word ever since. He knew exactly what he was waiting for from the age of nineteen: it would arrive in a specific way, it would feel a specific way, and he would know because it would match.

Eleven years. He kept asking, honestly and without any bitterness. He is not a man who sulks at God. He just kept the picture up and kept watching the door for it.

Four years ago something arrived that did not match. Nothing at that camp had prepared him for it because it was not the shape he had been given. It came in slowly, over some weeks, and it involved his temper going quiet and staying quiet, and a fear about his father that he had carried since he was a boy simply not being there one morning.

He did not count it. For three years, he did not count it, because he was still watching the door.

If you have been waiting for one particular version, come and sit down. Nothing that man said at that camp is going to be attacked here.

A description became a specification

Let us name what actually happened at that camp, because it is not what it looks like and it was nobody's fault.

A man described his own experience. He described it well, in four minutes, to nineteen year olds. That was a testimony and it was honest and it was his.

What went into the boy was not a testimony. It was a specification with acceptance criteria attached, and for eleven years anything that failed to meet the criteria got rejected at the door without being examined, including the thing that came.

You did not waste eleven years. Nothing that failed to match one description has ever been the record of what God has done in you. I am not saying it to be gentle with you. Scripture says who hath despised the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10), which is a question about the habit of dismissing what arrives small, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that question land on a man in a kitchen doorway rather than glance off him.

The question the verse actually asks

Here is what turned this for me, and it takes nothing off what that man was given.

Notice that the verse is a question and not a rebuke, and notice who it is aimed at.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel.Zechariah 4:10

It is asked of people looking at a foundation that was not as impressive as the one their fathers described to them. They knew what the previous version had looked like. They had been told, in detail, and what was in front of them did not match, and so they could not see it.

The verse does not tell them the small thing will grow into the big one. It asks them why the smallness became a reason to discount it at all.

You have been handed something already, and Scripture puts the questioning on the dismissing rather than on the size. That is written into the question itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns it toward a man who has been watching a door for eleven years.

Nothing here is against what that man had

Something needs saying plainly, or this becomes a page that quietly blames a preacher for four minutes he gave in good faith.

What that man described happened to him. He was not embellishing, the camp was not manipulating anybody, and a man telling nineteen year olds the best thing that ever happened to him is doing exactly what he should. The trouble was never in his four minutes.

The relief is not that the description was inflated.

You have something of your own to count, and counting it takes nothing off one word that man said. Scripture says there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all (1 Corinthians 12:6), where two unlike workings are traced back to one hand and neither is downgraded, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a specification, who decides what comes in what shape.

And if these eleven years have cost more than the people around you know, if sleep has gone, if the waiting 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.