They Said That Does Not Count

Rafael has met God most consistently at about a quarter to six in the morning, in a van, in a car park, waiting to start.

Not dramatically. He would not use a big word about it. But there is a thing that happens in that half hour, and it has happened for thirty years, and it is the steadiest fixture in his life. He would say, if you got him to say it at all, that he is not on his own in the van.

It also happens when he is working with his hands. And it happens without fail when he is standing at the back of a room where his family are all talking at once and nobody needs him for anything.

That is his whole account of God. A van, a pair of hands, a doorway. Thirty years of it.

And about six years ago a man he liked told him, in a friendly way, over food, that what Rafael was describing was not really what was being talked about. It was good, the man said, it was a real awareness, but there was another thing, and that other thing was what people meant when they used the language.

He was not being unkind. He genuinely thought he was opening a door.

And Rafael said ah, I see, and passed the bread, and went home, and something in his account of his own life got quietly downgraded that evening and has never been upgraded since.

Thirty years of a van in a car park, reclassified in about eleven seconds as good, but not the thing.

You may have had your evening.

Somebody kind explained that your experience of God was a lower category. Perhaps they used the word just. And you did not argue, because you never argue, and because they might have been right and how would you know.

I am not ranking anybody's encounters

Let me be clear about what I am not doing, because it would be very easy to do the same thing back.

I am not going to tell you that the other thing the man meant is not real. I do not know what he had in mind, and whatever it was, people have met God in ways that changed the shape of their whole lives, and I am not going to shrink that so you can feel better.

I am also not going to enter the arguments about it. Whether it is subsequent or simultaneous, what the evidence is or is not, whether any of it continued. Sincere people have divided over every one of those and you did not arrive here to be recruited.

What I object to is not his experience. It is the ranking.

Because the moment a person's account of God is placed on a scale, somebody is at the bottom of it, and it is always the one who did not bring a story.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word makes the Spirit a wind nobody can account for, and a thing beyond accounting cannot be ranked, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling in a man who was quietly reclassified over bread.

Where Paul puts the whole of a life

There is a line Paul says in Athens, to a crowd who had no Scripture in common with him at all, and he reaches for the largest possible description of where a human being lives.

For in him we live, and move, and have our being.Acts 17:28

Three verbs, and they are not exalted ones.

Live. Move. Have our being. That is breathing, walking about, existing on a Tuesday. Paul does not say in Him we have our peak experiences. He takes the most ordinary continuous activity of a human being and says that is where the in-Him is happening.

Which means the van at a quarter to six is not a lesser venue. It is the venue the verse is actually describing.

And the ordinary is where He said the whole of it takes place. The word puts living and moving and existing inside Him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who restores that to a man who let thirty years be downgraded over a meal.

And nothing about your account of God is second class. The word says there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all, and the Spirit is the one who makes the same God mean the same God.

Thirty years is not a small dataset

Now here is something practical, and I want you to weigh it, because I think you have never let yourself.

The man had a story. You have thirty years.

A story is a moment, and moments are real and they are not nothing. But you have a half hour in a van, five days a week, for three decades, and you would say, quietly, that you were not alone in it.

That is roughly seven thousand mornings.

Nobody is going to stand up in a meeting and testify to seven thousand ordinary mornings, because there is no way to tell that story. It has no shape. It cannot be said in three minutes with a beginning and an end.

Which is a fact about storytelling. It is not a fact about God.

And you have not been receiving less, you have been receiving it differently. The word says the same Spirit divides to every man severally as he will, and the Spirit is the one distributing rather than a queue where somebody got the good one.

And He has been with you in that van and He is not somebody who withdraws. The word says lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world, and the Spirit is the one who makes an alway cover a car park at quarter to six.