You Are Not The Evidence

It starts at about twenty to eight, in the car, before she has even got out.

The inventory. It runs the whole way through the evening and it asks the same three questions in the same order. Has anything happened through me yet. Have the people who were there four years ago noticed that nothing has. How long can a person go on being somebody something once happened to.

Four years ago it happened. Once, at her own kitchen sink, at half past eleven at night, with nobody in the house. She has never doubted it and she has never described it well, and she has spent four years trying to make something like it happen again in a room where people could see.

Not out of vanity. She would be horrified at that word. Out of a much quieter thing: a sense that a gift which has not been visible for four years is a gift somebody ought to be asking about, and that she is failing an examination nobody has scheduled.

So she watches her own hands on a Thursday. She knows precisely where they are and what they are doing all evening.

If you have been auditing yourself in a room, come in and get a cup. Nobody in that hall is going to be criticized here.

Nobody in that room is holding a stopwatch

Let us look at who the audit is actually being run for, because the answer is nobody and that is the whole difficulty.

Not the leaders. They have not raised it in four years and would be startled to learn it was a subject. Not the people who were there originally. Most of them think of it warmly two or three times a year and have never once wondered why it has not recurred.

The examination is hers, the invigilator is hers, and the marking scheme is hers, and she has been sitting it every Thursday for four years in a room where everybody else is simply glad she came.

You are not on trial in there. Nothing you have failed to produce in four years has ever been entered against you. I am not saying it to soothe a woman in a car park. The written word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the purpose is the good of people rather than the establishing of a case, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold at twenty to eight on a Thursday.

The purpose is profit, not proof

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that hall.

Read the final phrase, because everything she is doing hangs on a misreading of it.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.1 Corinthians 12:7

To profit withal. The purpose is stated, and it is the good of the people it reaches. It is not to demonstrate anything about God, who does not require corroboration, and it is not to establish anything about the person it came through.

And the giving is stated as done. It is given, present tense, as a fact about the arrangement, and nothing in the verse makes the reality of the giving depend on it being visible again within any period.

You were given to for the profit of people rather than as proof of anything, and Scripture says so in the same short verse. That is written into the phrase itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with her hands in her lap.

Nothing here is against that room

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about a congregation that put pressure on her.

They did not. Nobody in that hall has ever asked her to produce anything, the expressive people in it are not performing, and the ones who lift their hands are not doing it for an audience. Four years of standing among them has not been four years among people watching each other.

And the performance trap is not hers alone. It is this family's own besetting failure, it has been for a century, and she caught it in a room full of people who mostly have their own version of it.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. 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 deciding belongs to Him and the timing with it, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a woman on a Thursday, who determines what happens through anybody.

And if these four years have cost more than the people in that hall know, if sleep has gone, if Thursday 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.