He went in there because it was the only door open and it was raining.
Not to pray, particularly. He had twenty minutes and a wet coat, and the side chapel is small and always cold and nobody goes in it except at Christmas. He sat down at the back of eight rows.
What happened next took, he thinks, four or five minutes. He has never been able to shorten it into a sentence, and he has tried, in the car, many times, in the way a man rehearses something he is not going to say.
Two years. He has told nobody. Not his wife, though she would be gentle about it. Not the minister he has known for eleven years and genuinely likes.
And the reason is not embarrassment, exactly. It is that reporting a thing requires knowing what kind of thing it is, and he has never been able to establish that, and a man does not walk into a study and say, something occurred, I could not tell you what, in the cold chapel, in February, two years ago.
If you are carrying something you have never reported, come and sit in the courtyard. Nobody here is going to ask you to classify it.
Not reporting it is not the same as doubting it
Let us separate two things that have grown together over two years.
The first is a genuine practical difficulty: no category, therefore no sentence, therefore no conversation. That is a real problem and it is nobody's fault, and it does not resolve by being braver.
The second is what the difficulty has quietly become, which is a suspicion that a thing you cannot report is a thing that did not qualify. Those two are not connected, and they have been sitting next to each other for so long that they look like one.
You are not doubting God because you have no way of describing Him. Nothing about the missing sentence has ever reached back and altered the four minutes. I am not saying it to be gentle. The written word says the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit (Romans 8:16), which puts the confirming inside a person rather than in the report they can produce, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a cold chapel two years later.
The account where nobody had time to prepare
Here is what steadied me, and it is not an instruction to go and tell your minister.
There is a scene in Acts where a preacher is mid sermon and something happens that nobody in the room had any framework for at all.
While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word.Acts 10:44
Read the timing. While he was still speaking. Nobody had finished, nobody had introduced anything, and the men who came with Peter are described afterward as astonished, which is the word for people whose categories have just been overtaken.
They did not stop it and they did not certify it. They stood there, some of them holding assumptions that had gone out of date about four seconds earlier, and the account is completely relaxed about all of that.
You were not required to have a framework ready, and Scripture records Him arriving ahead of everybody's vocabulary rather than behind it. That is written into the timing of the sentence itself, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a man who has rehearsed an unsayable thing in a car for two years.
This page has no advice about your minister
Something must be said plainly, because a piece like this usually ends with a nudge.
Whether you tell him is your business and your judgement, and it depends on a hundred things about that man and that friendship that nobody writing this could possibly know. There is no instruction here in either direction.
What is being said is smaller and it is not about him at all.
You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and telling somebody about it was never the thing that made it count. Scripture says now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God (1 Corinthians 2:12), where the knowing is given directly and no intermediary appears anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit holds that steady in a man who has kept his own counsel for two years.
And if the carrying has cost more than anybody in your house 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.
So here is the turn, and it is not advice about a conversation.
He did this to you here. You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and you do not have to go. The written word says the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth (John 3:8), which makes not being able to say where a thing came from ordinary rather than disqualifying, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a classification, who makes that live in a cold side chapel in February.
I cannot tell you what God does next with what He gave you, or whether the words ever arrive. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that a missing sentence has never once canceled an event, and that in Acts He arrived before anybody had a framework ready.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the authority under these words is His and not your own. You speak under His will rather than yours, and what God does next with what He gave you, and when, is His to decide, in His own way and in His own time.
- Two years of not mentioning it, you are a silence about a category and you are not a silence about the thing itself. Romans 8 says the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit, which puts the confirming inside a man rather than in the report he can produce, and the Holy Spirit has been doing that since February two years ago. In the name of Jesus I stop reading you as doubt.
- Suspicion that a thing I cannot classify is a thing that did not qualify, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting in this courtyard tonight. John 3 says the wind blows where it wills and a man cannot tell where it comes from, and His Spirit made that ordinary rather than disqualifying. I am holding what I was given without a label on it.
- Father, You gave us the Spirit which is of God that we might know the things freely given to us, and First Corinthians 2 puts no intermediary anywhere in that sentence. I thank You that Your Spirit fell while Peter was still speaking, ahead of everybody's categories. He did this to me here, and here is where I am sitting on Sunday.
Acts 10:44
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