Everybody else has a moment. That is the part she cannot get past.
They have a Tuesday. They have a row of chairs, or a hospital corridor, or a place on a road, and something happened there and they can take you to it. Some of them can tell you what the weather was doing. The story has a hinge in it and everybody knows where the hinge is.
Hers took about two weeks and she still could not tell you which two weeks of that spring it was.
It came the way a season comes. On one side of it she was one kind of person and on the other side she was another kind, and there is no hinge anywhere in the middle of that, no Tuesday, no chairs, no weather. Just a slow arrival she noticed properly only after it had finished arriving.
She has never called it an event, out loud or privately, because an event has a moment in it and hers does not. So for nine years she has held something she does not have a category for, and the absence of the category has quietly become an absence of the thing.
If yours came in slowly, walk with me a while. Nobody else's Tuesday is going to be doubted here.
A moment is a way of telling, not a way of happening
Let us look at where the requirement for a moment actually came from, because it did not come from her and it did not come from God.
It came from the way accounts are told. A story needs a hinge or nobody can follow it, so the tellable ones are the ones with a Tuesday in them, and over years of hearing only tellable ones a person concludes that the Tuesday is the thing rather than the handle on the thing.
Everything that happened slowly is still happening. It simply never gets told, so it never gets counted, and after a while it stops being visible even to the person it happened to.
You are not without an event. Nothing that arrived without a hinge in it has ever been outside what God has done in you. I am not saying that to soften it. The written word says first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear (Mark 4:28), which describes the ordinary way growing happens and puts no moment anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a woman walking a lane nine years later.
The parable with no moment in it
Here is what settled this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody's Tuesday.
Read what the Lord chose as His picture of the kingdom working in a person, because He had every option available and He picked this one.
For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.Mark 4:28
Three stages and not one instant. He does not mention a day when the field changed. He gives a sequence, and the whole point of the sequence is that it happens while the man is asleep and does not know how.
That is not a lesser version of the kingdom coming. In that chapter it is the description of the kingdom coming.
You are inside the picture He chose to use, and Scripture puts the not knowing how right in the middle of it. That is written into the parable itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it home to a woman who has been waiting for a hinge that was never required.
Nothing here doubts anybody's Tuesday
Something has to be said very plainly, or this becomes a quiet objection to every account she has ever sat and listened to.
They had a moment. It happened, it was God, and the corridor was a real corridor and the row of chairs was real. Nine years of hearing those has not been nine years of hearing embroidery, and there is nothing on this page suggesting that a sudden thing is a shallow thing.
The relief is not that theirs was less than it sounded.
You have something of your own to count, and counting it takes nothing off one person's Tuesday. Scripture says now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4), where two unlike arrivals come from one hand and neither is ranked above the other, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the shape of a story, who decides which comes how.
And if these nine years have cost more than the people on that lane know, if sleep has gone, if the question 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.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise of a moment arriving late.
What He gave you was quiet and it was real. Yours does not have to look like theirs. The written word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the giving is stated without a clock attached to it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the shape a story needs, who sets how it comes.
I cannot tell you whether you ever get a moment you can point at, and I am not going to guess. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that two weeks in a spring you cannot date was never a lesser way for God to do something, and that a woman on the far side of a change is on the far side of it however she got there.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, however He answers.
- Need for a moment I can point at, you are a habit of how the stories get told and you are not the measure of what God did. Mark 4 says first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn, so the growing is described with no instant in it at all, and the Holy Spirit worked in me while I did not know how. In the name of Jesus I take you off the account.
- Suspicion that mine was not an event, you are not what God says about me and you are not walking this lane with me tomorrow. First Corinthians 12 says there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, so two unlike arrivals came out of one hand and neither was ranked, and His Spirit chose the way mine came. I am counting what is actually mine.
- Father, the manifestation of Your Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, and First Corinthians 12 hangs no clock on that giving. I thank You that You met them in a corridor on a Tuesday and met me across two weeks I cannot date, out of one hand. What He gave me was quiet and it was real.
Mark 4:28
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