Like She Had Coffee With Him

Priya loves Deepa. That has to be said first because everything else in this depends on it.

Twenty-two years of friendship. Deepa sat with her the whole night in the hospital. Deepa is the one who texts on the anniversary. There is no version of this where Deepa is the villain and Priya would take somebody's head off for suggesting it.

And Deepa talks about God the way you would talk about a person you saw this morning.

He told me not to take that job. I was in the car and He just said, no, wait. I woke up and He was already saying something about my brother.

She is not showing off. That is the thing that makes it hard. If she were showing off, Priya could file it. Deepa says these things the way you would say the boiler man came, and then moves on to something else, because to her it is simply Tuesday.

And every time she says one, something in Priya goes very quiet and stays quiet for about a minute.

Priya has been a Christian for twenty-six years. She reads. She prays, properly, not as a performance. She has given significant amounts of her life to people who could not pay her back.

And she has never once heard anything.

Nothing dramatic and nothing undramatic either. No voice, no impression, no strong sense, no words in the car. She has read books about hearing God and done what they said. She has sat in silence for long enough to be sure it was not a scheduling problem.

Twenty-six years, and the honest report is: nothing.

So when Deepa says He told me, Priya says oh, that is amazing, and means it, and something under her ribs goes cold for sixty seconds.

You may have a Deepa.

Somebody you love, who is not a fraud, who talks about God like a colleague. And you have never told them what happens in you when they do.

I am not going to take her down for you

Let me close off a door immediately, because it is the one people go through.

I am not going to suggest Deepa is exaggerating. I am not going to explain her experiences to you psychologically, or hint that she is mistaking her own thoughts for God, or hand you any of the small tools that would let you feel better by making her smaller.

That would work for about a week and it would cost you a friend, and it would be a lie besides. God speaks to people. He has done it since the beginning and He has never stopped and Deepa is telling you the truth as she has it.

Her experience is real. Leave it standing. It is one of the good things in the world.

And I am not entering the arguments about how any of it works, or whether it should look like this or like that. Sincere people have divided over that for centuries and you did not come here to be recruited to a position.

You came here because something goes cold under your ribs and you have never said so.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word makes the Spirit a wind nobody can account for, which means no exam can be set on it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling rather than an excuse.

The one time God says what He is not in

There is a passage where a man who has just seen the most dramatic thing in his whole ministry is standing on a mountain waiting for God, and what happens next is one of the strangest things in the Old Testament.

And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:11-12

Three times the text says where He was not.

And it is not saying wind and earthquake and fire are bad. It is saying that a man standing there waiting for God in the biggest available form was going to be looking in the wrong direction three times running.

Elijah had just had fire fall from heaven in front of a nation. He knew what the dramatic looked like, better than anybody alive. And on the mountain, God specifically declines to arrive that way.

And His absence from the dramatic is not His absence. The word says three times over that the LORD was not in it, and then puts Him in something you would miss if you were not close, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been listening for twenty-six years for the wrong volume.

And you are not somebody He has skipped. The word says I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, and it puts no condition on it about what a person has heard, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than announcing Himself on a schedule.

What you actually envy

Now here is the thing I want to put gently, because I think it is the true one.

I do not think you envy Deepa's voice. I think you envy her certainty.

She knows she is not alone. That is the actual possession. The sentences about the car and the job are just the receipts she happens to have, and what you want is not the receipts. It is the settled thing underneath them.

And that settled thing is not distributed on the basis of receipts. Half the people in Scripture who were unmistakably God's had no such conversations at all, and some who did were not helped by it.

And the certainty you want is available to you without the voice. The word says the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and it puts the witnessing in Him rather than in what you can quote, and the Spirit is the one doing it in you now.

And twenty-six years of nothing is not twenty-six years of absence. The word makes the wind precisely the thing nobody can date or account for, and the Spirit is the one who lets a woman hold that as fact rather than as a phrase she has been handed.