Quiet Is Not The Same As Nothing

Everything he had ever been shown about it was loud. That is where this starts and it is nobody's fault.

The accounts he grew up on had rooms in them. Volume. People on their feet. A moment somebody could point at afterward, with witnesses, and a before and an after that a whole congregation could confirm.

What came to him came at about half past eleven at night, at a sink, with a tea towel in his hand and nobody else in the house.

There was no sound. Nothing fell over. He stood there for a while and then he finished the washing up, and the next morning he was carrying something he had not been carrying the night before, and he has been carrying it ever since.

He decided within about a fortnight that it did not count. Not consciously, and never in those words. What happened is that he compared it with everything he had been shown, found no audience in it, and filed it somewhere he does not look.

Nine years. Nine years of a man who has something and has never once counted it.

If yours came with nobody watching, come in and lean on the counter. Nothing anybody else has ever described is going to be doubted here.

The verdict was reached without a hearing

Let us look at how the filing actually happened, because he never sat down and decided it and that is why it has never been reviewed.

He held two things side by side. On one side, a lifetime of accounts with rooms and volume and witnesses in them. On the other, a sink and a tea towel. And a comparison ran, quickly, without anybody supervising it, and produced a verdict that he then treated as information.

But the comparison was between an experience and a description. Descriptions keep the parts that tell well. His had no tellable parts, so it lost a competition it was never entered in.

You are not a man with nothing. Nothing about an experience with no audience in it has ever made it smaller than what happened to anybody else. I am not saying it to reassure a man at a sink. The written word says if the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body (1 Corinthians 12:15), which is a question about a member disqualifying itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man nine years into a filing decision.

The self-disqualification is put as a question

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one account he was ever given.

Read who is doing the disqualifying in that verse, because it is not the body and it is not God.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?1 Corinthians 12:15

The foot says it. Nobody excludes the foot. There is no committee in that verse, no ranking handed down from above, and no other member telling it to leave. The entire exclusion is self administered, on the grounds of not resembling a different member.

And Paul answers it with a question rather than an argument, which is a particular kind of reply: it treats the conclusion as obviously unfounded rather than as a case to be met.

Your exclusion was self administered, and Scripture answers that with a question rather than a defense. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a kitchen at half past eleven.

Nothing here doubts the loud accounts

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page suggesting the noisy versions were exaggerated.

They were not. The people whose accounts he grew up on were telling the truth, the rooms were real rooms, and the weeping and the laughing and the hands in the air were not performance. Nine years of holding those as the standard has not been nine years of being fooled.

And nothing here says a quiet thing is deeper than a loud one. That is the same ranking with the order reversed, and it would be just as false and would cost somebody else what it is trying to give him.

What He gave you was quiet and it was real. Yours does not have to look like theirs. Scripture says all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will (1 Corinthians 12:11), where the variety is traced to one hand making decisions, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the presence of witnesses, who settles what a thing is.

And if these nine years have cost more than the friends in that kitchen know, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have 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.