I Stopped Going Forward

Ross could not tell you the exact night he stopped, which he thinks is probably significant.

There was no decision. There was no moment of turning away and no crisis of anything. There were about eleven years of going forward, in various rooms, at various points, with genuine hope every single time, and then there was a period of going forward with slightly less hope, and then a stretch where he noticed he had not gone in a while, and then six years.

He does not avoid it. He is in the room. He sings, and he means it, and when the invitation comes he stays where he is and looks at the floor in a way that he hopes reads as thoughtful rather than as anything else.

And he has a word for this, and the word is maturity.

He says it to himself in exactly those terms. I have matured past needing that. He might even say it out loud to a younger man, and he would mean it kindly and he would be trying to be helpful.

The trouble with the word is that it is doing two jobs.

Some of it is true. He genuinely has stopped chasing a feeling, and that is real growth and nobody should take it off him. He is steadier than he was at twenty-nine and steadier is better.

But there is a second thing living inside the word, and it only comes out at certain moments, and it came out about a month ago when his daughter, who is nineteen and not tactful, asked him why he never goes up.

And what he said was: because I have been up. Repeatedly.

She said: and?

And he did not have an answer, and he changed the subject, and he has thought about that exchange most days since.

You may have your own word.

Maturity. Realism. Not needing the emotionalism. Perhaps a joke you make about yourself that lands very slightly wrong in your own ears afterwards.

I am not going to send you back up the front

Let me say straight away what this article is not.

It is not going to tell you to go forward next time. That would be a small manipulation dressed as ministry, and it would make the whole thing about a room's furniture, and I am not interested in getting you to move six meters.

It is also not going to tell you the going forward was wrong, or that those eleven years were wasted, or that you were doing it out of some immaturity you have now outgrown. A man hoping to meet God, repeatedly, over eleven years, is not a man with a problem. That is one of the better things a person can be.

And I am not entering any of the arguments. Whether it is a second experience or the same one, whether the evidence is one thing or another or none, whether it happens at a front or in a kitchen. Sincere people have divided over all of it for a long time.

You did not arrive to be enrolled on a side. You arrived because your daughter said and? and you have been turning it over for a month.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word makes the Spirit's coming a wind nobody can account for, which means there is no test to sit, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling rather than a let-off.

Who is doing the bearing witness

Here is the sentence I want to put in the middle of this, and I want you to look hard at the subject of the verb.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:16

The Spirit bears witness. He does it. It is His verb.

Not: your spirit produces evidence and the Spirit confirms it. Not: you generate a sense of assurance and He signs it off. The witnessing is His action, done alongside yours, and Paul writes it in the present continuous, as a thing going on rather than a thing that happened once at a front.

And He has been bearing witness in you the whole six years. The word puts the verb in the present and puts it in His hands, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a man who has been standing still and looking at the floor.

And you did not have to summon Him. The word never makes His witnessing conditional on a response to an invitation, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than waiting to be fetched from the front of a room.

The thing the word was covering

Now let me name what I think the second job is, and then hand it back to you to look at yourself.

Maturity has been doing some real work in your life. It has also been holding a door shut on a sentence that goes something like: I asked properly, many times, with everything I had, and it did not come, and I would rather stop asking than keep finding that out.

That is not immaturity. Read it again. That is a man protecting himself from a repeated disappointment, which is one of the most ordinary and reasonable things a person does.

But it is not maturity either, and calling it that has meant you never got to grieve it.

And you are allowed to say the true sentence out loud. The word says pour out your heart before him, God is a refuge for us, and it does not filter what may be poured, and the Spirit is the one who makes an honest sentence safe rather than dangerous.

And nothing about you is under review because you stayed in your seat. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that rather than requiring a walk to the front to secure it.