I Can Tell You The Week It Changed

The week beginning the fourteenth of a month two years ago. She has it written down.

Not the day, which she says is important, because if it were a day she would have found the cause by now. It was a week. Monday it was there. By the following Monday it was not, and there is no incident anywhere inside those seven days that would account for it.

She has been through them with the sort of thoroughness that most people reserve for something that matters to somebody else.

She has the calendar for that week. She knows who she saw, what she watched, what she said to her sister on the Wednesday that she has since apologized for twice, though her sister does not remember it. She has read back through her own notes from that fortnight looking for a shift in tone. She has considered, seriously and in order: unconfessed sin, a wrong relationship, a compromise at work, a slow drift in what she was reading, and one specific conversation she should have stopped and did not.

Nothing accounts for it.

And so the search has continued, because the alternative to searching is accepting, and accepting is not something she is prepared to do about this.

Two years. She would not describe herself as obsessed and she would be wrong. Every fresh sermon on grieving the Spirit is a lead. Every book gets bought and skimmed for a description that matches her week. She has three of them going at the moment.

And underneath it all is a simple structure that she has never once said out loud.

She believes she did something, that He responded to it by withdrawing, and that when she finds the something and puts it right, He will come back. Until then she is a woman with a case file, working.

And that is you with your own week, or you would not still be reading.

A guarantee is a legal word and Paul chose it

You will want the actual mechanism rather than a reassurance, so here it is. Paul reaches for commercial language on purpose.

And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.2 Corinthians 1:21-22

Guarantee. The word is arrabon, and it is not a poetic flourish. It was the ordinary Greek term for a deposit paid at the front of a transaction: money handed over that both commits the buyer and is itself part of the price. It is still the modern Greek word for an engagement ring.

Which means the Holy Spirit in you is not a reward held on your conduct. He is the deposit God put down, and a deposit is retrieved only if the party who paid it defaults, and He is the party who paid it.

You are holding a deposit God paid, and the search has been for a cause that could not have removed it. It is written that He has put His seal on us and given us His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee (2 Corinthians 1:22). The Holy Spirit was in the week beginning the fourteenth, on the Monday and on the following Monday.

Now the structure of your search, and I want to take it seriously because it is a genuinely careful one.

You have been running a two-year investigation on the hypothesis that there is a cause. And the finding, after two years of honest work, is that there is no cause in that week. You would accept that finding in any other domain. You have refused to accept it here, and you have refused because accepting it seems to leave you with nothing.

But it does not. Read what the finding actually says. There is no cause because there was no departure to have caused.

You are not the party who can default on this, and there is nothing in that week left to find. It is written that it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us (2 Corinthians 1:21), with God as the subject of every verb in the sentence. The Holy Spirit has never once been withdrawn from a woman while she looked for the reason.

And the last of it, plainly, with nothing attached.

He is here. Not on the far side of a discovery. There is no thing to find and put right first, and no fresh sermon that is going to hand you the missing piece, because the piece is not missing.

You are not cast off, and the case can be closed tonight. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never is not waiting on the outcome of an investigation. The Holy Spirit has been with you through both years of the search, including the parts of it you would call obsessive.