The One Time I Faked It

Cerys was seventeen and it lasted about a minute and she has never told anybody.

It was the last night. There had been four days of it and something had genuinely been happening to people, and she was not cynical about that then and she is not now. Two of her friends had been changed in a way that stuck; one of them is a nurse in Bristol and it is still the reason.

On the last night the room went a certain way, and the leaders moved along the rows, and a woman came to her.

And Cerys, who had felt nothing at all in four days, who liked this woman enormously and could feel the whole room leaning, did what a seventeen year old does.

She let her hands go up a bit. She let her face do something. She made a sound.

The woman was delighted. She held Cerys's shoulders and said something lovely, and moved on, and Cerys stood there with her eyes closed for a while because opening them felt impossible.

That was twenty-one years ago.

And here is what has happened since, which is not what you would expect. It has not made her a cynic. It has not put her off God. She is thirty-eight and she is in her church every week and she means all of it.

What it has done is sit there.

One minute, in a room, in 2005, that she has never confessed to anybody and has never been able to leave alone either. It surfaces at odd times. It surfaced last month when her own daughter came home from something, glowing, and Cerys felt joy and then, immediately, a small cold thing she was ashamed of.

She has a theory that everything since is downstream of that minute. That she disqualified herself at seventeen and has been operating on a technicality ever since.

You might have your own minute.

Maybe you did something like it. Maybe you have nodded when you were not sure, or said amen to something you had not followed, or let a room believe a thing about your interior that was not true, because the alternative was to be the one person standing there with your eyes open.

The verse about what you are made of

Let me put the sentence in front of you first, before I say anything about the minute, because I want it in your hand while we talk.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

That is not a low view of people. Read the context: it sits inside a psalm about mercy and about a father pitying his children, and the for at the front of it is giving the reason for the mercy.

He knows what we are made of. He does not need to be informed about the load-bearing capacity of a seventeen year old in a room where everybody is leaning.

And He knew exactly what you were made of that night and He was not surprised. The written word makes His knowledge of our frame the reason for His pity rather than the basis of a charge, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has carried one minute for twenty-one years.

And you are not disqualified. The word says he hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about your standing rather than a sentiment about His mood.

What was actually in that room

Now let me describe what happened, accurately, because I think you have only ever described it one way.

A seventeen year old girl, on the fourth day, having felt nothing, watching two friends be genuinely changed, liked and trusted by a woman who was kind to her, in a room of two hundred people all moving in one direction.

And that girl did what nearly every human being does under that combination, which is that she went with the room, in a small way, for about sixty seconds.

That is not a character defect. That is social pressure operating on a person exactly as it operates on all of us, and it is one of the best-documented things about human beings, and Scripture is not naive about it either. Peter did a considerably larger version of it in a courtyard while warming his hands, and the man he denied made him breakfast.

I am not saying it was fine. You did not think it was fine and neither do I, and the twinge you have carried is not neurotic.

I am saying it was seventeen, and a room, and a minute, and it was never large enough to be the hinge of your whole life.

And that minute is not the axis your life turns on. The word says as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us, and the Spirit is the one who makes an eastward distance real to somebody who has kept a thing in a drawer since 2005.

The theory you built on it

Here is the piece I actually want to take apart, because I think it does more damage than the minute ever did.

Your theory is that you disqualified yourself at seventeen, and that everything since is running on a technicality.

But look at what that theory requires. It requires that whether the Spirit is in you depends on your performance in a room in 2005.

That is not how any of it works. Jesus says the wind blows where it wills and nobody can account for it, which means nobody can disqualify themselves from it either, because you cannot fail an exam that was never set.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The word makes the Spirit a wind beyond anybody's accounting, and the Spirit is the one who settles rather than examines.

And His Spirit is in you and you did not have to summon Him. The word never makes His presence contingent on how a person behaved at the front of a room, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than reviewing an incident.