Everyone Else Came Up Crying

Six of them went in that morning and he was fourth.

He remembers the order because of the towels. There were six towels on a plastic chair, folded, and somebody's mother had put them there in the order of the names, which is the kind of thing that gets done in that sort of room and is a small act of love that nobody notices.

The first one out was a woman in her fifties who came up with her face completely gone, both hands over her mouth, and had to be held by two people on the steps. The second was a teenage boy who laughed and then cried and then laughed again in about four seconds. The third came up saying something that was not words.

Then him.

And what he was thinking about, going down, was whether they had remembered to take the lamb out of the freezer.

He is not proud of it. He has never told anybody. But that is the honest content of his mind at the moment the water closed over him: a specific concern about a specific piece of meat in a specific freezer drawer, and then the cold, and then coming up, and then a sort of general pleasantness, the way you feel when a thing you have been meaning to do is done.

He got out. He took the fourth towel. Somebody hugged him and he hugged back.

And on the way to the car, with his hair still wet, he did the thing he has done every time he has thought about that morning for the last seventeen years, which is to run the comparison.

The woman with her hands over her mouth. The boy laughing and crying. The one whose words came out as noise.

And him, thinking about the lamb.

He is forty-eight. Nothing about his faith is theatrical and never has been. He prays plainly. He gives quietly. He has sat with two men through the worst nights of their lives and said almost nothing and both of them still bring it up.

But there is a comparison that runs, unbidden, and it has run for seventeen years, and it always ends in the same place: whatever happened to them did not happen to me.

Take the comparison off the table

I want to do something specific before anything else, and it is not comfort.

I want to take the comparison away from you.

Not soften it. Not put it in perspective. Remove it, on the grounds that it was never a legitimate instrument, and that you have been reading a measurement off a device that does not measure anything.

Here is why. That woman's face and that boy's laughing and the sound that came out of the third one are all reports of nervous systems. They are what a particular human being's body did in a particular moment under a particular load. They are real, and they were probably beautiful to watch, and they are not data about God's activity, because God has never published His work in that format.

So the comparison you have run for seventeen years compares a thing that cannot be seen against three things that can. It was always going to come out the same way.

Now here is what actually holds you.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.2 Corinthians 5:7

That is a very short verse and it is doing enormous work. Paul is not saying feelings are bad. He is saying that the mechanism of the Christian life is not the visible register, and that a man who navigates by what he can see and feel is navigating by an instrument the Lord did not issue him.

You have been walking by faith for seventeen years while grading yourself on sight, and that is not my clever observation, it is the written word making the distinction, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in the comparing place rather than the informed one.

Let me press on that a little, because I do not want to be glib about the woman on the steps.

Something genuinely happened to her. I am not going to explain her away in order to make you feel better, because that would be a cheap trade and you would smell it. God does move on people visibly and it is a mercy when He does.

But hear this, plainly. You were not given less that morning. Whatever He did, He did in a place that a room cannot see into, and Scripture says the walk is by faith, and the Spirit of God who has been in you since that day is the same Spirit who was in the woman who could not stand up.

I want to say something about the lamb, too, because I think you have carried it as evidence.

You were thinking about a freezer at a holy moment. You have treated that for seventeen years as proof of a shallow interior. It is not proof of anything except that you are a man with a household who was doing an ordinary thing on an ordinary Sunday and whose mind, like every mind, does not clear itself on request.

You are not shallow. The word says the walk is by faith rather than by the quality of a man's attention, and the Spirit is the one who has kept you praying plainly for seventeen years, and two men who went through the worst nights of their lives with you would testify about your depth without being asked twice.

And here is the last of it, and this is the one I want you to carry out to the car with your hair still wet.

You have been His since before you were fourth in that line, and the fourth towel was folded for you by somebody's mother in the order of the names, and God's care for you that morning was not less careful than that. The word settles it, the Spirit confirms it, and no face on any set of steps was ever the measure.