The Word for Still Being Here

There are three cars in the car park and hers is one of them, and it is always one of them, and it has been one of them for a very long time.

It is a weekday morning. Nothing special is happening and nothing special was advertised. The radiator on the left hand wall clicks on at about ten past and takes until half past to make any difference, and everybody knows this and nobody has ever mentioned it. The woman who does the flowers is at the front with a bucket, and she nods, and that is the entire exchange, and it is enough.

At the door there is a moment. It lasts perhaps a second and a half and it happens every single time. It is not a struggle and it is not dramatic. It is simply a small gap in which the question of whether to go in is genuinely open, and then it closes, and she goes in.

She has been asking God for one thing for years now. She is not going to describe it here and she would not describe it to you either, because she has described it enough times to enough people, and the describing has stopped helping. Nothing about it has moved. Not worse, particularly. Not better. It sits in her life exactly where it has always sat, and every so often somebody who loves her asks how it is going, and she says the same, and they nod, and there is a pause, and then they talk about something else.

She would not call what she is doing faith. Faith, in her hearing, has more in it than this. Faith sounds like a woman with something in her hands, and she is very aware that her hands are empty and have been for a while.

She would not call it habit either, though people might, and she would not argue with them. Habit is what a body does without deciding, and she decides. That is the whole point of the second and a half at the door. Nobody in that building has any idea it happens, and it happens every time, and she has never once decided the other way.

So she sits down, in the cold, with the radiator ticking, and she does not know what to call any of it.

That is where this is aimed, and I am not going to be clever with you in it. If you have kept coming and you have nothing to point at, and if somebody asked you tonight what you would call the last few years you would genuinely not have a word ready, then this is yours, and there is a word, and it is not the one you have been assuming.

The plainest hope in Scripture is made in rubble

There is a sentence in the Bible that names what you keep doing, and it is worth knowing where the man who wrote it was standing when he said it.

He was not standing anywhere good. The book he wrote it in is a book of funeral poetry about a city that had been destroyed, written by somebody who had watched it happen and had nothing left to be optimistic about. He is not being encouraging. He is not writing to lift anybody. He is sitting in rubble, working out what is still true, and this is what he arrives at.

It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.Lamentations 3:26

Two words carry that verse. Hope, and quietly.

Not hope and expect. Not hope and see results. Not hope and be able to explain it to a friend who asks how it is going. Hope, and quietly wait, said by a man surrounded by evidence that nothing was going to be all right, and he calls it good, and he does not say why it is good, and he does not tell you when the waiting ends.

You are doing the thing Scripture calls hope. Romans 8:25 says that if we hope for what we do not see, then we wait for it with patience, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been sustaining exactly that in a woman who thought she had run out of something, because hope in that verse is not a feeling of expectancy at all: it is what a person does in the absence of evidence, and it has a posture rather than a mood.

Read the verse before it and the whole thing turns over. Hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? Having nothing to show for it is not the disqualification. It is the definition. The moment there is something to point at, the thing stops being hope and becomes sight, which is why hope only ever exists in exactly the conditions you have been living in and treating as evidence against yourself.

You have not been running on nothing. Lamentations 3:26 calls the quiet waiting good, in the middle of a book with no good news anywhere in it, and the Spirit is the One who has been keeping the second and a half at that door from closing the other way, which means something has been holding the decision open for years that nobody in the building ever saw.

What has been keeping you upright

Now the harder half, and I am going to be honest rather than warm here, because you would hear the difference at once.

Nothing here promises that the thing you keep asking about turns around. I do not know whether it does. Heaven owes neither of us a schedule, and I have sat with enough unanswered prayer to refuse to hand anybody a timetable that God did not give. If somebody tells you this morning that your breakthrough is close, put that sentence down, because they are guessing.

Here is what I can put in your hands instead, and it is not a consolation prize.

You are held by something you did not manufacture. It is written that He upholds all things by the word of His power, and His Spirit is described as the One who helps in our weakness when we do not know what to pray for as we ought, which means the arriving has not been coming out of your own reserves and it was never going to run out when they did.

You have assumed you were the one keeping this going. That is the assumption I most want to take off you. A person cannot decide the same thing at the same door for years out of willpower, and the fact that you are still at that door is not evidence of your stamina. It is evidence of Somebody else's grip, and you have been reading your own persistence as if it were self-generated and finding it thin.

You have had the Holy Spirit doing this in you the whole time. Philippians 1:6 says that He who began a good work will carry it on, and the Spirit is the One who carries it, which puts the whole of the last few years in a different column: not a woman holding on, a woman being held, on the mornings she felt something and on the far greater number of mornings when she felt nothing at all.