Three Times In That Line

Nabil has stood in that line three times and he can tell you what he was wearing each time.

The first was at twenty-six, on the last night of something, when a good number of people went forward and the room was warm and open and nobody was performing. A man he did not know put both hands on his head and prayed for about ninety seconds with real care.

Nabil stood there with his eyes shut waiting.

Then the man moved along, and Nabil stood a bit longer because moving felt abrupt, and then he went back to his row and sat down and picked up his jacket and held it on his lap for the rest of the evening.

The second time was four years later and he had told himself he was not going to. He went anyway, near the end, when the line was thinning and there was less of a crowd.

The third time was two years ago and nobody knows about it. He went to a different church, on a Sunday, where he did not know a soul, precisely so that nobody would ask him afterwards how it had gone.

Nothing. Three times.

And what has settled in him over those years is not anger and it is not doubt exactly. It is a quiet, unshakeable, entirely private conclusion that whatever door other people are going through is shut in his case, and that he should stop rattling it, and that the mature thing is to be content with what he has.

He has called that contentment for a while now.

It does not feel like contentment at eleven o'clock at night.

You may know the line. Maybe yours was once, maybe it was a dozen times, maybe it was a room where you never went forward at all because you had already worked out how it would go.

And a conclusion settled in you, quietly, without you agreeing to it.

The one thing Jesus says about the wind

There is a sentence in a night-time conversation in John, and I want you to notice what it refuses to do.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

Canst not tell.

That is Jesus, describing the Spirit, and building the unaccountability into the description. Not as a problem to be solved. As the nature of the thing.

The wind is exactly the thing you cannot summon, cannot direct, cannot schedule and cannot produce a report on. You hear the sound and you do not get the origin or the destination. And He says: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

Every one. Including the ones who can describe it beautifully. They also cannot tell whence it cometh. They just have a story, and a story is not a mechanism.

And you were never able to summon Him and you were never meant to be. The written word builds the unaccountability into the description of the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a relief in a man who has been reading three empty walks back to his seat as a verdict.

And your inability to produce evidence is not evidence. The word says thou canst not tell, and it says it of everyone born of the Spirit rather than of a defective subgroup, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing receipts.

I am not going to explain what happened to the others

Now I want to be careful, because there is a cheap and unkind move available here and I am not making it.

I am not going to tell you that the people who had something were making it up, or working themselves up, or that their thing was less real than they think. I was not there and neither were you, not inside them. Some of them met God and it altered the shape of their lives, and you have watched that happen and you know it is not theater.

Their thing was real. That is allowed to stand.

And I am also not going to enter the arguments about it. Whether this is a second experience or the same one, whether the evidence is this or that or none, whether any of it continued past the first century. Sincere people have divided over every one of those for a very long time, with real reasons on each side.

You did not come here to be enrolled. You came here with a jacket on your lap.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The word makes the wind the thing nobody can account for, which means no test can be set on it, and the Spirit is the one who settles rather than examines.

The word Jesus does not use

Here is the thing I most want you to see, and it is about a word that is absent.

In that sentence, He does not say ask for the wind. He does not say qualify for the wind. He does not describe a procedure at all, and He is talking to a religious professional who would very much have liked one.

He describes what is already happening.

Which raises the question you have never asked, because you have been busy asking a different one. You have been asking why did nothing come. The question underneath it is: what makes you certain nothing did?

You have been checking for the thing you were told to check for. A rush, a heat, a language, a weeping. Those are real and they happen to people. They are also the sound of the wind and not the wind, and the sound is the part He specifically says you get inconsistently.

And He may well have already blown here. The word puts the wind's arrival outside your ability to detect or date it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a possibility a man is allowed to hold rather than a comfort he is being handed.

And you are not somebody He is withholding Himself from. The word says if ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him, and the Spirit is the one who makes a how much more land in a man who stopped asking.